ALBERT SCHWEITZER - OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

The Albert Schweitzer Library

The Albert Schweitzer Library, published in association
with the Albert Schweitzer Institute for the Humanities,
presents new editions of the writings of Albert Schweitzer
in English translation. The library will reflect the extraor-
dinary scope of Schweitzer s knowledge and achievements
in theology, music, history, and humanitarian philosophy.
It will also restore to print his autobiographical writings
and include new translations and collections of works never
published in book form.

The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of Its
Progress from Reimarus to Wrede
The Primeval Forest
The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle
Out of My Life and Thought: An Autobiography

Out of My Life
and Thought

An Autobiography

Albert Schweitzer

Translated by Antje Bultmann Lemke
Foreword by President Jimmy Carter

Preface by Rhena Schweitzer Miller and Antje Bultmann Lemke

The Johns Hopkins University Press / Baltimore and London

in association with

The Albert Schweitzer Institute for the Humanities

Copyright 1933, 1949 by Henry Holt and Company, Inc.

Copyright © 1990 by Rhena Schweitzer Miller
Translation copyright © 1990 by Antje Bultmann Lemke
Preface copyright © 1990 by Rhena Schweitzer Miller and
Antje Bultmann Lemke

Foreword © 1998 The Johns Hopkins University Press
All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

Johns Hopkins Paperbacks edition, 1998
9876543

This edition authorized by Rhena Schweitzer Miller and by the Albert
Schweitzer Institute for the Humanities, Dr. Harold Robles, President.

All photographs are courtesy of the Albert Schweitzer Institute for the
Humanities.

The Johns Hopkins University Press
2715 North Charles Street
Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363
www.press.jhu.edu

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Pubh’cation Data

Schweitzer, Albert, 1875-1965.

[Aus meinem Leben und Denken. English]

Out of my life and thought : an autobiography / Albert Schweitzer ; trans-
lated by Antje Bultmann Lemke ; foreword by Jimmy Carter ; preface by
Rhena Schweitzer Miller and Antje Bultmann Lemke.
p. cm. — (The Albert Schweitzer library)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8018-6097-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Schweitzer, Albert, 1875-1965. 2. Strasbourg (France) — Biography.

3. Missionaries, Medical — Gabon — Lambarene (Moyen-Ogooue) — Biography.

4. Theologians — Europe — Biography. 5. Musicians — Europe — Biography.

I. Lemke, Antje Bultmann. II. Title. III. Series.

CT1018.S45A282 1998

610'.92 — dc21

[B] 98-28166

CIP

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

Contents

Foreword, by President Jimmy Carter ix

Preface, by Rhena Schweitzer Miller and

Antje Bultmann Lemke xi

1 Childhood, School, and University 1

2 Paris and Berlin, 1898-1899 15

3 The First Years in Strasbourg 24

4 Study of the Last Supper and the Life of Jesus,

1900-1902 32

5 Teaching Activities at the University of

Strasbourg. The Quest of the Historical Jesus 43

6 The Historical Jesus and the Christianity

of Today 53

7 My Work on Bach 61

8 On Organs and Organ Building 71

vii

Contents

viii

9

I Resolve to Become a Jungle Doctor

81

10

My Medical Studies, 1905-1912

96

11

Preparing for Africa

110

12

Literary Studies During My Medical Course

117

13

First Activities in Africa, 1913-1917

136

14

Garaison and St. Remy

162

15

Back in Alsace

175

16

Physician and Preacher in Strasbourg

182

17

The Book of African Reminiscences

189

18

Giinsbach and Journeys Abroad

197

19

The Second Period in Africa, 1924-1927

207

20

Two Years in Europe. The Mysticism
of Paul the Apostle

216

Epilogue

223

Chronology

247

Bibliography

257

Index

261

Photographs follow page 146.

Foreword

Albert Schweitzer brought to the early
twentieth century one of the most pow-
erful and wide-ranging intellects the
world has seen. He not only studied but
also mastered philosophy, music, theol-
ogy, and medicine. He even became the
worlds authority on Bach and organ
building. Then Dr. Schweitzer demon-
strated his gratitude for the gifts he had
been given by devoting the majority of
his life to relieving the suffering of the
people of Central Africa.

Despite an isolation that is hard to
fathom in our age of easy communica-
tions, while in Africa Dr. Schweitzer
stayed current on the affairs of the

x Foreword

world and provided commentary on ethics, war, nuclear
weapons, and environmental degradation. His eclectic inter-
ests benefited not only Africa but the entire world.

President Jimmy Carter

Preface

“I want to be the pioneer of a new
Renaissance. I want to throw faith in
a new humanity like a burning torch
into our dark times.” So Albert
Schweitzer proclaimed in the preface
to his book Civilization and Ethics in
1923 .

Out of My Life and Thought, the
book he considered his most impor-
tant, provides the key to understand-
ing the man, his thought, and his work.
It is the testimony of this pioneer
whose philosophy of respect for all life
is essential if we are to succeed in mov-
ing from the dark ages of religious and

XI

xii Preface

political strife toward a new Renaissance embracing the
recognition of human rights, of environmental responsibil-
ities, and of political interdependence.

In this book he describes how he became Schweitzer the
theologian, the philosopher, the musician, and the medical
doctor. The many facets of his personality, his abundance
of knowledge in such different fields made him the active
and spiritual center of his hospital in Lambarene and a
figure of worldwide influence and recognition.

As to the origin of his autobiography, he told the readers
of the first edition of 1931: “In 1925 I wrote a forty-two-
page account for the seventh volume of the scholarly series
Contemporary Philosophy in Self-Portraits, published by
Felix Meiner in Leipzig. . . . When this treatise was pub-
lished as a separate book, many readers took it to be an
account of my whole life and thought. To remedy this mis-
conception I decided to complete the initial study in such
a way that it would tell not only about my scholarly work
but also about my life and thought in general.

Out of My Life and Thought is the only book Schweitzer
completed in Africa, and thirty years later he wrote to
a friend in Paris: “That I was able to write this book I
owe to the two physicians who assisted me in Lambarene.
When they heard about the publisher’s interest, they of-
fered to take over some of my work so I could be at the
hospital only in the morning. By writing every afternoon
and until midnight, I was able to complete the manuscript
in five months. Later on I could never have taken so
much time off to concentrate on my writing. It gave me
the opportunity to express my thoughts on religion, on
philosophy and the arts, and to pave the way for my re-
flections on the principle of Reverence for Life, which can

Preface xiii

motivate us to return to a civilization that is determined
by humanism.”

The first German edition of 1931 was translated by
Schweitzer’s friend C. T. Campion and published in 1933
by Allen & Unwin in London and by Henry Holt in New
York. Other translations followed, and at last count there
were nineteen, from Chinese and Czech to Tamil and Tu-
legu. Some translations, for example that of 1959 in Oriyan,
an Indian language, include prefatory letters by Hermann
Hesse and Pere Dominique Pire.

According to the notes in Schweitzer’s personal German
copy, a French translation was intended as early as 1932.
Yet, as with several unfinished manuscripts, he did not find
the time to devote to this project.

In 1953 another attempt at a French edition was made,
when Madeleine France translated the German original.
Schweitzer wanted to review the manuscript before its
publication but he had other priorities. With his accep-
tance of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1954, his eightieth birth-
day in 1955, and his appeal in 1957 for a nuclear test ban,
his days and nights were filled with correspondence and
preparation of lectures, which were of pressing concern
to him.

Finally, in 1959, during his last sojourn in Europe,
Schweitzer spent three weeks in Paris. With his friend and
collaborator Robert Minder he edited the French transla-
tion, which was published in 1960 by Albin Michel in Paris.
When Schweitzer received the first copy in Lambarene in
January 1960 he immediately wrote to the publisher, plead-
ing for removal of the wrapper that read: “Le grand docteur
vous parle.” This statement, “The great doctor speaks to
you,” reminded Schweitzer of Hitler’s announcement “Le

xiv Preface

Fiihrer vous parle,” to which the French had been exposed
two decades earlier.

The French edition contains several changes from the
German original, especially the deletion of passages
Schweitzer considered either too technical — such as some
of his reflections on theological subjects — or displeasing to
the French reader. This edition has been most helpful in
the preparation of the new English translation, since many
convoluted German sentences and long paragraphs were
rephrased and broken up. Some phrases have been re-
placed by precise, more assertive statements.

In addition to the French version, the new English trans-
lation is based on a copy of the German edition in the
Archives Centrales Albert Schweitzer at Giinsbach, which
contains Schweitzer’s own corrections, made between 1930
and 1960.

Cognizant of the fact that it is impossible to give an
identical rendering of any literary text in a second language,
this translation aims to be as faithful as possible to the
author’s own style. No attempt has been made to change
Schweitzer’s expressions, to “degenderize” or otherwise
adjust the language in accordance with current trends. Spe-
cial care has been taken with Schweitzer’s explication of
his philosophy and theology. Where the earlier version
freely substituted reason for spirit, scientific for scholarly,
dogmatic for orthodox, the original meaning of the German
expression has been chosen. An Evangelische Gemeinde is
a “Protestant parish” and not a group of Evangelical be-
lievers, and when Schweitzer speaks about die Welt he
intends to include the whole world and not only mankind.
Thus, the new translation hopes to clarify ambiguities and
to come as close as possible to Schweitzer’s language, his
intentions, and his philosophy.

Preface xv

A chronology of the life of Albert Schweitzer, which fol-
lows the text, gives a quick overview of major events and
completes the autobiography for the period until his death
in 1965. For readers interested in other books by and about
Schweitzer, a bibliography of selected titles in English has
been included.

We want to express our deep gratitude to Gustav Woytt,
a nephew of Schweitzer, who had worked for him for many
years. He was familiar with the development and different
translations of this book and graciously shared his knowl-
edge. We owe to him and to the generous cooperation of
the Archives Centrales Albert Schweitzer in Giinsbach,
France, that we have a broader knowledge of the genesis
of this book.

Our warmest thanks go to Miss Elizabeth Gempp, who
has encouraged and generously supported the preparation
of this new edition. For the typing and editing we would
like to express our gratitude to Eileen Snyder and Margaret
Sevcenko.

Last but not least we would like to thank the members
of Henry Holt and Company, especially Mr. John Macrae
for the enthusiasm with which he received the manuscript,
and his advice throughout the publishing process, and Amy
Robbins for her perceptive suggestions and expert copy
editing.

For the photographs we are indebted to the Archives
Centrales Albert Schweitzer in Giinsbach, France, the Al-
bert Schweitzer Center in Great Barrington, Massachu-
setts, and the Albert Schweitzer Fellowship in New York.

As we move toward a new century it is amazing to see
how the spirit of Albert Schweitzer has retained its fresh-
ness and authenticity. His life and thought, nurtured by
German and French culture and by the philosophies of East

xvi Preface

and West, and forged by human service in Europe and
Africa, can point the way toward a global society.

Rhena Schweitzer Miller
Antje Bultmann Lemke

DECEMBER 1989

Childhood, School,
and University

I was bom on January 14, 1875, at Kay-
sersberg in Upper Alsace, the second
child of Louis Schweitzer, who at that
time served as minister for the little
flock of Protestants in that Catholic
place. My paternal grandfather was
schoolmaster and organist at Pfaflfen-
hofen in Lower Alsace, and three of
his brothers occupied similar posts.
My mother, Adele, nee Schillinger,
was a daughter of the pastor of Mtihl-
bach in the Munster Valley, Upper Al-
sace.

A few weeks after my birth my father
moved to Giinsbach in the Munster

1

2 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

Valley. Here with my three sisters and one brother I spent
a happy childhood overshadowed only by my father’s fre-
quent illnesses. His health improved later on, however,
and as a sturdy septuagenarian he looked after his parish
during the war under the fire of the French guns that Swept
the valley from the heights of the Vosges mountains, de-
stroying many a house and killing many an inhabitant of
Gunsbach. He died at a ripe old age in 1925. My mother
had been run over and killed by cavalry horses on the road
between Gunsbach and Weier-im-Tal in 1916.

When I was five years old my father began giving me
music lessons on the old square piano that we had inherited
from grandfather Schillinger. He had no great technical
skill but improvised charmingly. When I was seven I sur-
prised our teacher by playing hymn tunes on the harmo-
nium with harmonies I supplied myself. At eight, when my
legs were hardly long enough to reach the pedals, I began
to play the organ. My passion for that instrument was in-
herited from my grandfather Schillinger, who had been
much interested in organs and organ building, and, as my
mother told me, had a reputation for improvising magnif-
icently. In every town he visited, he made a point of getting
to know its organs. When the famous organ was installed
in the Stiftskirche at Lucerne he journeyed there to see its
builder at work.

I was nine years old when I was permitted for the first
time to substitute for the organist at a service at Gunsbach.

Till the autumn of 1884 I went to the Gunsbach village
school. After that, for a year I was at the Realschule (which
is a secondary school giving no instruction in classical lan-
guages) at Munster, and there I had private lessons in Latin
to prepare me for entering the fifth class in the Gymnasium.

Childhood, School, and University 3

In the autumn of 1885 I entered the Gymnasium at M til-
hausen in Alsace. My godfather, Louis Schweitzer, my
grandfather’s half brother, who was director of the primary
schools in that town, was kind enough to take me to live
with him. Otherwise my father, who had nothing beyond
his slender stipend on which to bring up his large family,
could hardly have afforded to send me to a Gymnasium.

The strict discipline to which I was subjected in the house
of my great-uncle and his wife, who had no children of their
own, was very good for me. It is with deep gratitude that
I always think of all the kindness I received from them.

Although it had cost me some trouble to learn to read
and write, I had got on fairly well in school at Gtinsbach
and Mtinster. At the Gymnasium, however, I was at first
a poor scholar. This was owing not solely to my being slack
and dreamy but partly also to the fact that my private les-
sons in Latin had not prepared me sufficiently for the fifth
class, in which I entered the school. It was only when my
teacher in the fourth. Dr. Wehmann, showed me how to
study properly and gave me some self-confidence that
things went better. But Dr. Wehmann’s influence over me
was due above all to the fact, of which I became aware
during my first days in his class, that he prepared every
lesson he gave very carefully in advance. He became a
model of fulfillment of duty for me. I visited him many
times in later life. When, toward the end of the war, I went
to Strasbourg, where he lived during the latter part of his
life, I at once inquired after him. I learned, however, that
starvation had ruined his nervous system and that he had
taken his own life.

My music teacher at Mtilhausen was Eugene Mtinch, the
young organist at the Reformed Church of St. Stephen.

4 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

This was his first post after leaving the Academy of Music
at Berlin, where he had been seized by the then reawak-
ening enthusiasm for Bach. I owe it to him that I became
acquainted in my early years with the works of the cantor
of St. Thomas and from my fifteenth year onward enjoyed
the privilege of sound instruction on the organ. When, in
the autumn of 1898, he died of typhoid fever in the flower
of his age, I perpetuated his memory in a booklet written
in French. It was published in Miilhausen, and was the
first product of my pen to appear in print.

At the Gymnasium I was chiefly interested in history and
natural science. In languages and mathematics it took a
great deal of effort for me to accomplish anything. But after
a time I felt a certain fascination in mastering subjects for
which I had no special talent. Consequently, in the upper
classes I was considered one of the better students, though
not one of the best. With essays, however, if I remember
rightly, I was usually the first.

In the first class we were taught Latin and Greek by the
distinguished director of the Gymnasium, Wilhelm Deecke
of Liibeck. His lessons were not the dry instruction of a
mere linguist; they introduced us to ancient philosophy
while giving us glimpses into contemporary thought. He
was an enthusiastic follower of Schopenhauer.

On June 18, 1893, I passed my final examinations. In the
written papers I did not do very well, not even in the essay.
In the oral examination, however, I attracted the attention
of the chairman of the board of examiners — Dr. Albrecht
of Strasbourg — with my knowledge of history and my his-
torical judgment. A “very good” in history, substantiated
by some words of praise, adorned my diploma, which oth-
erwise was quite mediocre.

In October of the same year, the generosity of my father’s

Childhood, School, and University 5

elder brother, a businessman in Paris, secured for me the
privilege of organ instruction from the Parisian organist
Charles-Marie Widor. My teacher at Miilhausen had taught
me so well that Widor, after hearing me play, took me as
a pupil, although he normally confined his instruction to
members of the organ class at the Conservatory. This in-
struction was for me an event of decisive importance. Widor
presided over a fundamental improvement in my technique
and made me strive to attain perfect plasticity in playing.
At the same time, thanks to him, the meaning of the ar-
chitectonic in music became clear to me.

My first lesson with Widor happened to be on the sunny
October day when the Russian sailors under Admiral Av-
ellan arrived in Paris for the visit that was the first mani-
festation of the Franco-Russian friendship then beginning.
I was delayed by the closely packed, expectant crowds that
filled the boulevards and the central streets, and was very
late in reaching the master’s house.

At the end of October 1893, I entered the University of
Strasbourg. I lived in the theological seminary of St.
Thomas (the Collegium Wilhelmitanum), the principal of
which was the learned Reverend Alfred Erichson. Just at
that time he was occupied with the completion of his great
edition of the works of Calvin.

The University of Strasbourg, recently founded, already
had a fine reputation. Unhampered by tradition, teachers
and students alike strove to realize the ideal of a modern
university. There were hardly any older professors among
the faculty. A fresh breeze of youthfulness animated the
whole university.

I took the two subjects of theology and philosophy to-

6 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

gether. As I had learned only the elements of Hebrew in
the Gymnasium, my first term was spoiled by work for the
“Hebraicum” (the preliminary examination in Hebrew),
which I passed with much effort on February 17, 1894.
Later, spurred on again by the effort to master what did
not come easily to me, I acquired a sound knowledge of
that language.

Anxiety about the Hebraicum did not prevent me from
eagerly attending the lectures by Heinrich Julius Holtz-
mann on the Synoptics — that is to say, the three first Gos-
pels — and others by Wilhelm Windelband and Theobald
Ziegler on the history of philosophy.

On April 1, 1894, I began my year of military service,
but the kindness of my captain, Krull by name, made it
possible for me to be at the university by eleven o’clock
almost every day, and so to attend Windelband’s lectures.

When in the autumn of 1894 we went on maneuvers in
the neighborhood of Hochfelden (Lower Alsace), I put my
Greek Testament in my knapsack. I should explain that at
the beginning of the winter term, those theological students
who wished to compete for a scholarship had to pass an
examination in three subjects. Those, however, who were
then doing their military service had only to take one. I
chose the synoptic Gospels.

I took my Greek New Testament with me to maneuvers
so I would not disgrace myself with a poor performance
before Holtzmann, whom I admired very much. At that
time I was robust and did not know fatigue, so I could study
in the evenings and on holidays. During the summer I had
gone through Holtzmann’s commentary. Now I wanted to
get to know the text and see how much I remembered of
his commentary and his lectures. This produced an amazing

Childhood, School, and University 7

discovery. Holtzmann had gained recognition in scholarly
circles for his hypothesis that the Gospel of Mark is the
oldest, and that its plan serves as the basis for Matthew
and Luke. That seemed to justify the conclusion that the
public activities of Jesus can only be understood through
Mark’s Gospel. This conclusion puzzled me deeply. On one
of the rest days, which we spent in the village of Guggen-
heim, I concentrated on the tenth and eleventh chapters
of Matthew, and became aware of the significance of what
is narrated in those two chapters by him alone, and not by
Mark as well.

In the tenth chapter of Matthew the mission of the twelve
disciples is narrated. As Jesus sends them out He tells them
that they will almost immediately suffer severe persecution.
But nothing of the kind happens.

He tells them also that the appearance of the Son of Man
will take place before they have gone through the cities of
Israel, which can only mean that the heavenly Messianic
Kingdom is dawning. He has therefore no expectation of
seeing them return.

How is it possible that Jesus leads His disciples to expect
events that do not take place?

I was dissatisfied with Holtzmann’s explanation that we
are dealing not with a historical discourse about Jesus but
with one made up at a later date, after His death, out of
various “Sayings of Jesus. ” A later generation would never
have gone so far as to put into His mouth words that were
belied by the subsequent course of events.

The bare text compelled me to assume that Jesus was
really announcing the persecution of the disciples, which
would then be followed by the appearance of the super-
natural Son of Man. This announcement, however, was
proven wrong by subsequent events.

8 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

But how did He come to entertain such an expectation,
and what must His feelings have been when events turned
out otherwise than He had assumed they would?

Matthew 11 records the Baptist’s question to Jesus, and
the answer Jesus gave him. Here too it seemed to me that
Holtzmann and the commentators in general do not suffi-
ciently appreciate the riddles of the text. Whom does the
Baptist mean when he asks Jesus whether He is “the one
who is to come”? Is it then quite certain, I asked myself,
that by the Coming One no one can be meant except the
Messiah? According to late Jewish Messianic beliefs, the
coming of the Messiah is to be preceded by that of his
Forerunner, Elijah, risen from the dead, and to this pre-
viously expected Elijah Jesus applies the expression “the
Coming One,” when He tells the people around Him (Mat-
thew 11:14) that the Baptist himself is Elijah who is to come.
Therefore, I concluded, the Baptist in his question used
the expression with that same meaning. He did not send
his disciples to Jesus to ask Him whether He was the Mes-
siah; he wanted to learn from Him, strange as it may seem
to us, whether He was the expected Forerunner of the
Messiah, Elijah.

But why does Jesus not give him a clear answer to his
question? To say that He gave an evasive answer in order
to test the Baptist’s faith avoids the issue and has been the
source of many a poor sermon. It is much simpler to assume
that Jesus avoided saying either yes or no because He was
not yet ready to make public who He believed Himself to
be. From every point of view the account of the Baptist’s
question proves that at that time none of those who believed
in Jesus held Him to be the Messiah. Had He already been
accepted in any way as the Messiah, the Baptist would have
indicated this in his question.

Another reason for finding a new interpretation came
from the words of Jesus, addressed to the crowd after the

Childhood, School, and University 9

departure of the Baptist’s messengers. “Among those bom
of women there has risen no one greater than John the
Baptist; yet he who is least in the Kingdom of Heaven is
greater than he” (Matthew 11:11).

The usual explanation — that in these words Jesus ex-
pressed a criticism of the Baptist and placed him at a level
below that of the believers assembled round Him as ad-
herents of the Kingdom of God — seemed to me both un-
satisfying and tasteless, for these believers were also born
of women. By giving up this explanation I was forced into
the supposition that, in contrasting the Baptist with mem-
bers of the Kingdom of God, Jesus was taking into account
the difference between the natural world and the super-
natural Messianic world. As a man in the condition into
which all men enter at birth, the Baptist is the greatest of
all who have ever lived. But members of the Kingdom of
Heaven are no longer natural men; through the dawning
of the Messianic Kingdom they have experienced a change
that has raised them to a supernatural condition akin to
that of the angels. Because they are now supernatural
beings, the least among them is greater than the greatest
man who has ever appeared in the natural world of the age
that is now passing away. John the Baptist does, indeed,
belong to this Kingdom either as a great or a humble mem-
ber of it. Yet his greatness, unique and surpassing that of
all other humans, lies in the fact that he became incarnate
in this natural world.

Thus, at the end of my first year at the university, I was
troubled by the explanation then accepted as historically
correct of the words and actions of Jesus when He sent the
disciples out on their mission. As a consequence of this, I
also questioned the interpretation that viewed the whole
life of Jesus as historical.

10 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

When I reached home after maneuvers, entirely new
horizons had opened up for me. Of this I was certain: that
Jesus had annouced not a kingdom that was to be founded
and realized in the natural world by Himself and the be-
lievers, but one that was to be expected as coming with
the approaching dawn of a supernatural age.

I would of course have considered it presumptuous to
hint to Holtzmann in my examination, which I took shortly
afterward, that I distrusted his conception of the life of
Jesus, which was universally shared by the critical school
of that time. In any case, I had no opportunity to do so.
With his well-known kindness he treated me, a young stu-
dent hindered in my studies by military service, so gently
that in the twenty-minute interview he demanded from me
nothing beyond a summary comparison of the contents of
the first three Gospels.

In my remaining years at the university I pursued, often
to the neglect of my other subjects, independent research
on the Gospels and on the problems of the life of Jesus.
Through these studies I became increasingly convinced that
the key to the riddles awaiting solution is to be looked for
in the explanation of the words of Jesus when He sent the
disciples out on their mission, in the question sent by the
Baptist from his prison, and, finally, in the way Jesus acts
upon the return of the disciples.

How grateful I was that the German university does not
supervise the student too closely in his studies, nor keep
him breathless through constant examinations, as is the case
in other countries, but offers him the opportunity for in-
dependent scholarly work!

The Strasbourg theological faculty of that day had a dis-
tinctly liberal character. Aside from Holtzmann there was

Childhood, School, and University 11

Karl Budde, the Old Testament specialist, who had recently
come to Strasbourg and was my favorite theology teacher.
What especially pleased me about him was his simple yet
graceful presentation of his scholarly research. I found his
lectures an aesthetic delight.

Along with the lectures in theology I regularly attended
those in philosophy.

I studied music theory under Jacobsthal, a pupil of Bel-
lermann, who in his one-sidedness refused to acknowledge
as art any music after Beethoven’s. Pure counterpoint, how-
ever, one could learn thoroughly from him, and I have
much to thank him for.

In my musical development I owed much to Ernest
Munch, a brother of my Miilhausen teacher, who was or-
ganist of St. Wilhelm’s in Strasbourg and conductor at the
Bach concerts he started with the choir of St. Wilhelm’s.
He entrusted to me the organ accompaniment of the can-
tatas and the Passion music. At first I played only at the
rehearsals, in place of his Miilhausen brother, who then
took my place at the actual performances. Before long,
however, I also played at the performances if his brother
could not come. In this way, while I was still a young
student, I became familiar with the work of Bach and had
an opportunity to deal with the practical problems of pro-
ducing the master’s cantatas and Passion music.

St. Wilhelm’s Church in Strasbourg ranked at that time
as one of the most important centers of the Bach renaissance
that was beginning to emerge at the end of the century.
Ernest Munch had an extraordinary knowledge of the works
of the cantor of St. Thomas. He was one of the first to
abandon the modernized rendering of the cantatas and the
Passion music that had become universal at the end of the

12 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

nineteenth century, and he strove for performances in a
purer style, with his small choir accompanied by the famous
Strasbourg orchestra. Many an evening we sat with the
scores of the cantatas and the Passion music and discussed
the correct method of rendering them. Ernest Munch’s
successor as conductor at these concerts was his son Fritz
Munch, the director of the Strasbourg Conservatory.

My veneration for Bach was matched by the same feeling
for Richard Wagner. When I was a schoolboy at Miilhausen,
at the age of sixteen I was allowed for the first time to go
to the theater, and there I heard Wagner’s Tannhauser.
This music overpowered me to such an extent that it was
days before I was capable of giving proper attention to my
lessons in school.

In Strasbourg, where the operatic performances con-
ducted by Otto Lohse were outstanding, I had the oppor-
tunity of becoming thoroughly familiar with the whole of
Wagner’s works, except, of course, Parsifal, which at that
time could only be performed at Bayreuth. It was a great
experience for me to be present in Bayreuth in 1896, at
the memorable new performance of the tetralogy, the first
since the original in 1876. Parisian friends had given me
tickets. To pay for the journey I had to content myself with
one meal a day.

Today, if I experience a Wagner performance with all
sorts of stage effects clamoring for attention alongside the
music, as though it were a film show, I cannot help thinking
with regret of the earlier mise-en-scene of the tetralogy at
Bayreuth, the very simplicity of which made it so marvel-
ously effective. Not only the staging but the whole perfor-
mance was in the spirit of the departed master.

Both as singer and actor Yogi, as Loge, made the deepest

Childhood, School, and University 13

impression on me. From the moment of his appearance he
dominated the stage without perceptibly having to do any-
thing to draw attention to himself. He did not wear the
harlequin dress of modem players, nor did he dance round
the stage to the rhythm of the Loge motif, as is the fashion
today. The only thing about him that was striking was his
red cloak. The only movements he executed to the rhythm
of the music were those with which, as if acting under some
compulsion, he threw his cloak now over one shoulder,
now over the other, his gaze fixed on what was happening
around him, yet himself quite indifferent to it all. Thus he
plainly stood for the restless force of destruction among the
gods, who were marching forward, blindly, to their doom.

My student years at Strasbourg passed quickly. At the end
of the summer of 1897 I presented myself for the first
theological examination. As the topic for the so-called thesis
we were given: “A comparison of Schleiermacher’s concept
of the Last Supper with that of the New Testament and the
professions of faith of the Reformers.” The thesis was an
exercise assigned to all candidates alike and had to be fin-
ished within eight weeks. It determined whether one would
be admitted to the examination.

This task led me back again to the problem of the Gospels
and the life of Jesus. All dogmatic and historical interpre-
tations of the Last Supper, which I had to review for my
final examination, seemed unsatisfactory. None addressed
the significance of the historical celebration of Jesus with
His disciples and of the origin of the primitive Christian
ceremony of the Communion. A remark of Schleiermacher
in the section of his famous Dogmatics in which he treats

14 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

the Last Supper gave me much to think about. He points
out that according to the accounts of the Last Supper in
Matthew and Mark, Jesus did not charge the disciples to
repeat the meal. We must therefore familiarize ourselves
as well as we can with the thought that the repetition of
the celebration in the primitive community goes back only
to the disciples and not to Jesus Himself. This thought,
which Schleiermacher presented in a brilliant piece of rea-
soning but did not pursue to the limit of its possible his-
torical consequences, preoccupied me even after I had
completed the thesis for my candidature.

If, I said to myself, the command to repeat the meal is
absent from the two oldest Gospels, that means that the
disciples did in fact repeat it, with the body of believers,
on their own initiative and authority. That, however, they
could do only if there was something in the nature of this
last meal that made it significant apart from the words and
actions of Jesus. But, since no past or current explanations
of the Last Supper have made intelligible how it was
adopted in the primitive community without a command
from Jesus, I had to conclude that the problem of the Last
Supper was unresolved. Thus, I went on to investigate the
question of whether the significance of the meal for Jesus
and His disciples was not connected with the expectation
of the Messianic feast to be celebrated in the Kingdom of
God, which was soon to appear.

Paris and Berlin,

1898-1899

On May 6, 1898, I passed the first
theological examination, the official
state examination, and then spent the
whole of the summer in Strasbourg to
devote myself entirely to philosophy.
During this time I lived in the house
at the Old Fish Market (No. 36) in
which Goethe had lived while he was
a student at Strasbourg.

Windelband and Ziegler were emi-
nent teachers in their subjects. Win-
delband’s strength lay in ancient phil-
osophy, and his seminars on Plato
and Aristotle are among the best mem-
ories of my student days. Ziegler’s do-

15

16 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

main was ethics and the philosophy of religion. For the
latter he was especially well prepared through his earlier
studies in theology at the “Stift,” the Protestant seminary
at Tubingen.

After my examination, at the request of Holtzmann I was
given the Goll scholarship, which was administered by the
St. Thomas Chapter and the theological faculty jointly. Its
value was twelve hundred marks (six hundred dollars) an-
nually, and it was awarded for six-year periods. The recip-
ient was under an obligation either to take, in six years at
the most, the degree of licentiate in theology at Strasbourg
or to repay the money he had received.

On the advice of Theobald Ziegler, I determined that I
would work first on a dissertation toward the doctoral de-
gree in philosophy. At the end of the term, he suggested,
in a conversation held on the steps of the University of
Strasbourg under his umbrella, that my subject should be
the religious philosophy of Kant, a suggestion I found most
attractive. Toward the end of October 1898, I went to Paris
to study philosophy at the Sorbonne, and to continue my
organ lessons under Widor.

I did not attend many lectures in Paris. To begin with,
the unceremonious way in which the matriculation was
conducted annoyed me. The antiquated method of instruc-
tion, which made it impossible for the faculty, however
outstanding in quality, to give their best, also contributed
to making the Sorbonne disappointing. There were no com-
prehensive courses such as I had been accustomed to at
Strasbourg. Either the professors gave lectures that bore
solely on the examination syllabus or they lectured on spe-
cial subjects.

At the Protestant theological faculty (on the Boulevard

Paris and Berlin, 1898-1899 17

Arago), I sometimes heard lectures on doctrine by Louis
Auguste Sabatier and others by the New Testament scholar
Louis Eug&ne Menegoz. I felt great esteem for them both.
But on the whole that winter in Paris was devoted to music
and to my dissertation for the doctorate.

With Widor — who now gave me lessons without
charge — I worked at the organ, and under Isidore Philipp,
who a little later became a teacher at the Conservatory, at
the piano. At the same time I was a pupil of Franz Liszt’s
talented pupil and friend Marie Jaell-Trautmann, an Al-
satian by birth. She had already retired from a life of public
piano recitals, at which, for a short time, she shone as a
star of the first magnitude. She now dedicated herself to
the study of the physiological aspects of piano playing. I
was the guinea pig on which she tried her experiments,
which were made in cooperation with the physiologist F6r6,
so I participated in them. How much I owe to this gifted
woman!

The finger — so her theory goes — must be as frilly conscious
as possible of its relationship to the keys. The player must
be conscious of the tension and of the relaxation of the
muscles from the shoulder down to the fingertips. He must
learn to prevent all involuntary and all unconscious move-
ments. Finger exercises that aim merely at rapidity must
be renounced. As the finger prepares for a motion, it must
always try to project the desired sound. A resonant touch
is realized by the quickest and lightest possible depression
of the keys. But the finger must also be conscious of the
way it lets the depressed key rise again. In the depression
and releasing of the keys the finger finds itself in an im-
perceptibly rolling movement, either inward (toward the
thumb) or outward (toward the little finger). When several

18 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

keys are depressed one after another, with movements roll-
ing in the same direction, the corresponding tones and
chords are organically linked.

Tones produced by movements that roll in different di-
rections stay apart by their very nature. Through thought-
fully differentiated movements of the fingers and of the
hand, one can attain both differentiation of sonority and
sensitivity to phrasing. To achieve an ever more conscious
and ever closer relationship with the keys, the finger must
cultivate to the utmost its sensitivity to their touch. With
the perfecting of this sensitivity the player will become at
the same time more responsive both to tone color and to
color in general.

Marie Jaell pushed this theory to the extreme by pro-
claiming that through the appropriate development of the
hand nonmusical people could become musical. Starting
from the physiology of the piano touch, she wanted to ad-
vance a theory about the nature of art in general. She thus
obscured her correct and forceful observations about the
essence of artful touch with deep, often baroque-sounding
observations and deprived herself of the recognition her
research deserved.

Under Marie Jaell’s guidance I completely transformed my
hand. I owe it to her that by well-directed, time-saving
practice I became increasingly master of my fingers to the
great benefit of my organ playing.

The more traditional piano instruction I received from
Philipp was also extraordinarily valuable and protected me
from what was one-sided in the Jaell method. As my two
teachers had a poor opinion of each other, I had to keep
each from knowing that I was a pupil of the other. What
trouble it cost me to play with Marie Jaell in the morning
k la Jaell and with Philipp in the afternoon k la Philipp!

Paris and Berlin, 1898-1899 19

With Philipp and Widor I am still united in a firm bond
of friendship; Marie Jaell died in 1925. Through Widor I
met many interesting personalities in the Paris of that day.
He was also concerned about my material welfare. Many
a time, if he had the impression that my slender purse did
not provide me with enough to eat adequately, he took me
after my lesson to his regular haunt, the Restaurant Foyot
near the Luxembourg, so I might have a satisfying meal.

My father s two brothers and their wives, who had settled
in Paris, also showed me much kindness. The younger one,
Charles, who had made a name for himself as a linguist
through his efforts to improve the teaching of modern lan-
guages, put me in touch with people at the university. Thus
I was able to feel at home in Paris.

My thesis for the doctorate suffered in no way from the
demands made on me, either by my art or by my social
life, for my good health allowed me to be prodigal with
nocturnal labor. It happened sometimes that I played for
Widor in the morning without having been to bed at all.

To consult the literature on Kant’s philosophy of religion
in the Bibliothbque Nationale proved to be impracticable
because of the cumbersome regulations in the reading
room. I therefore resolved without further ado to write the
thesis without troubling about the literature, and to see
what results I could obtain by burying myself in the Kantian
writings themselves.

As I studied these texts, I noticed variations in his use of
language; for example, in several passages on religious is-
sues in his Critique of Pure Reason the word intelligible,
which corresponds to Kant’s basic criticism, is replaced by

20 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

the more naive term transcendental. I then traced all
expressions of significance throughout his works on the phi-
losophy of religion in order to find the context in which
they appear, and to see whether they had undergone some
change in meaning. This enabled me to prove that the long
section on the “Canon of Pure Reason” is not a part of the
Critique of Pure Reason, but actually an earlier work of
Kant that he included there, although it does not agree
with what came later. The earlier study he called “A Sketch
of the Philosophy of Religion.”

Another discovery was that Kant never developed any
further the religiophilosophical scheme of transcendental
dialectic found in the Critique of Pure Reason. His religious
philosophy in the Critique of Practical Reason, with
its three postulates of God, Freedom, and Immortality, is
not at all the same as that hinted at in the Critique of
Pure Reason. In the Critique of Judgment and in Religion
Within the Limits of Reason Alone, he abandoned the reli-
gious philosophy of the three postulates. The train of
thought that appears in these later works leads one back
once more to the path taken in the “Sketch of the Philos-
ophy of Religion.”

Kant’s philosophy of religion, then, which everyone re-
garded as identical to that of the three postulates, is in fact
constantly changing. This is because the presuppositions of
his critical idealism and the religiophilosophical claims of
the moral law are incompatible. In Kant’s work his critical
and his ethical philosophies of religion developed in tan-
dem, as he sought to adjust and reconcile both. In the
transcendental dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason he
thought he had unified them without difficulty. But the
scheme he designed does not work because Kant, rather
than staying with his earlier concept of the moral law, as
prefigured in the transcendental dialectic of the Critique
of Pure Reason, enriches it constantly. This more profound
conception of moral law raises religious questions, however,

Paris and Berlin, 1898—1899 21

which go beyond what can be found in Kant’s conception
of religious idealism. At the point where his religious phi-
losophy acquires its more profound moral law, it loses its
interest in the very convictions that occupy the foremost
place in critical idealism; significantly in this connection,
when Kant’s religious thought is most completely domi-
nated by his deepest ethic, the postulate of Immortality
plays no part. Instead, then, of keeping to the philosophy
of religion established by critical idealism, Kant allows him-
self to be led further away from it by the religious philos-
ophy of his ever deepening moral law. As he becomes more
profound, he is unable to remain consistent.

In the middle of March 1899, I returned to Strasbourg and
presented my completed study to Theobald Ziegler. He
approved it and scheduled the defense of my dissertation
for the end of July.

I spent the summer of 1899 in Berlin, mainly occupied with
reading philosophy. My goal was to have read all the chief
works of ancient and modem philosophy. At the same time
I attended lectures by Hamack, Pfleiderer, Kaftan, Paul-
sen, and Simmel. At Simmel’s lectures I was at first an
occasional, but afterward a regular, auditor.

It was only later that I established contact with Hamack,
whose History of Dogma I had read in Strasbourg with
great enthusiasm. I had been introduced to him by friends,
and I visited his home. I was so overawed by his knowledge
and the universality of his interests that I was too inhibited
to answer his questions adequately when he spoke to me.
Later in life I received from him many postcards, cordial
and full of substance. The postcard was his usual means of

22 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

correspondence. Two very detailed cards that I received at
Lambarene about my then just published book, The Mys-
ticism of Paul the Apostle, belong to the year 1930 and must
be among the last that he ever wrote.

I spent a great deal of time with Carl Stumpf. His psy-
chological studies on auditory sensitivity were of great in-
terest to me. I participated regularly in the experiments
he and his assistants performed, and again I served as
guinea pig, as I had done with Marie Jaell in Strasbourg.

The Berlin organists, with the exception of Egidi, dis-
appointed me somewhat because they were more inter-
ested in virtuosity than in the true plasticity of style to
which Widor attached so much importance. And how dull
and dry was the sound of the new Berlin organs compared
with that of Cavaille-Col’s instruments in St. Sulpice and
Notre Dame.

Professor Heinrich Reimann, the organist of the Kaiser
Wilhelm Memorial Church, to whom I had brought a letter
of introduction from Widor, allowed me to play the organ
regularly, and engaged me as his deputy when he went
away on holiday. Thanks to him I made the acquaintance
of some of the musicians, painters, and sculptors of Berlin.

I became acquainted with the academic world at the
home of the widow of Ernst Curtius, the well-known Hel-
lenist. She received me cordially as an acquaintance of her
stepson, the district superintendent of Colmar. There I
often met Hermann Grimm, who tried hard to convert me
from the heresy that the contents of the fourth Gospel are
not reconcilable with those of the first three. To this day I
consider it my great good fortune that I had the privilege
of meeting the leaders of intellectual life of the Berlin of
that day.

Paris and Berlin, 1898-1899 23

The intellectual life of Berlin made a much greater
impression on me than that of Paris. In Paris, the cosmo-
politan city, the intellectual life was fragmented. One had
to get thoroughly acclimatized before one could see its
merits. The intellectual life of Berlin, in contrast, had its
center in its well-organized, lively university. Moreover,
Berlin at that time was not yet a cosmopolitan city but gave
the impression of being a provincial town that was devel-
oping happily in every respect. Altogether it had an air of
healthy self-assurance and a confident faith in its destiny
not to be found in contemporary Paris, which was then
being tom apart by the Dreyfus case. Thus I came to know
and love Berlin during the finest period of its existence. I
was especially impressed by the simple life-style of Berlin
society and the ease with which one was admitted to its
families.

The First Years in
Strasbourg

At the end of July 1899, I returned to
Strasbourg to receive my doctorate in
philosophy. In the oral examination,
Ziegler and Windelband both thought
that I fell below the level my disser-
tation had led them to expect from me.
The time I had spent with Stumpf in
his experiments had been lost so far as
preparation for the examination was
concerned. In addition, in reading
original works I had neglected my text-
books far too much.

The dissertation appeared as a book
before the end of 1899 under the title
The Religious Philosophy of Kant:

The First Years in Strasbourg 25

From the “Critique of Pure Reason ” to “Religion Within
the Limits of Reason Alone.”

Theobald Ziegler advised me to qualify as a privatdozent
in the philosophy faculty, but I decided for theology. He
hinted to me that if I were a privatdozent in philosophy
people would not be pleased to see me active as a preacher
as well. But to me preaching was an inner necessity. The
opportunity to speak every Sunday to a congregation about
the essential questions of life seemed to me wonderful.

From this time on I remained in Strasbourg. Although
I was no longer a student, I was given permission to live
in the Collegium Wilhelmitanum (the seminary of St.
Thomas), which I loved so well. The room overlooking the
quiet garden with its big trees— the room in which I had
passed so many happy hours as a student — seemed a most
appropriate place for the work that now lay before me.

The moment I had finished correcting the proofs of my
doctoral dissertation, I set to work on getting my licentiate
to teach theology. I decided to obtain that degree as quickly
as I could so that the Goll fellowship I held could be made
available to another qualified student as soon as possible.
My friend Jager, a gifted student of Oriental languages, for
whose sake I hastened, never made use of this fellowship.
Instead he became director of the Protestant Gymnasium
at Strasbourg. Had I known this I would have traveled
longer before settling down, and would also have studied
at some English universities.

On December 1, 1899, 1 obtained a post as assistant vicar
of the Church of St. Nicholai in Strasbourg. Later, after I
had passed the second theological examination, I was ap-
pointed vicar. This second examination, usually conducted
by elderly clerics, I barely passed on July 15, 1900. So

26 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

occupied was I with the dissertation for the theological
licentiate, I had neglected to refresh my memory as I should
have on the various branches of theology, which this ex-
amination demanded. It was only through the forceful in-
tervention of Pfarrer Will, whom I had delighted with my
knowledge of the history of dogma, that I did not fail. It
was especially unfortunate that I did not know enough about
the hymn writers and their lives.

The staff at St. Nicholai consisted of two elderly, but still
vigorous, ministers: Pastor Knittel, one of my father’s pre-
decessors at Giinsbach, and Pastor Gerold, an intimate
friend of one of my mother’s brothers, who had been in-
cumbent at St. Nicholai but had died young. To these two
men I was appointed as an assistant, chiefly so that I might
relieve them of the afternoon service, the Sunday children’s
service, and the confirmation classes.

The tasks given to me were a constant source of joy. At
the afternoon service, with only a small group of worshipers
present, I could use the intimate style of preaching I had
inherited from my father and in which I could express
myself better than at the morning service. Even today I
am never quite free from shyness before a large audience.
As the years passed, the two old gentlemen had to spare
themselves more and more, and I frequently had to preach
in the morning as well. I used to write my sermons out in
full, often making two or three drafts before I had the final
version. When delivering the sermons, however, I did not
tie myself to this text, which I had carefully memorized,
but often departed from it considerably.

My afternoon sermons, which I looked upon as simple
devotional meditations rather than sermons, were so short
that on one occasion certain circles of the congregation

The First Years in Strasbourg 27

complained. Pastor Knittel, who also held the office of “In-
spector of Spiritual Matters,” had to call me before him,
and when I appeared he was as embarrassed as I was.

To his question as to how he should respond to the ag-
grieved members of the congregation, I answered that he
might reply that I was only a poor curate who stopped
speaking when he found he had nothing more to say about
the text. Thereupon he dismissed me with a mild reprimand
and an admonition not to preach for less than twenty min-
utes.

Pastor Knittel represented orthodoxy softened by pie-
tism; Pastor Gerold was a liberal. But they fulfilled the
duties of their office together in a truly brotherly spirit.
Everything was carried out in perfect harmony. The work
accomplished at this unpretentious church, opposite the
St. Thomas seminary, was remarkable.

Many times during these years, whenever I had a free
Sunday, I went to Giinsbach to take over the service for
my father. Three times a week, from eleven to twelve, when
the morning lessons were over, I had to take up the con-
firmation classes for boys. I tried hard to give them as little
homework as possible, so that the lessons might be a time
of pure enjoyment for heart and spirit. I therefore used the
last ten minutes of our classes to recite with them words
from the Bible and verses from hymns, so that they would
know them and the words would stay with them throughout
their lives. The aim of my teaching was to bring to their
hearts and thoughts the great truths of the Gospels so re-
ligion would have meaning in their lives and give them the
strength to resist the irreligious forces that might assail
them. I also tried to awaken in them a love for the Church,
and a desire for that hour of spiritual peace to be found in

28 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

the Sunday service. I taught them to respect traditional
doctrines, but at the same time to hold fast to the saying
of Paul that where the spirit of Christ is, there is free-
dom.

Of the seeds that for years I was thus sowing, some have
taken root and grown, as I have been privileged to learn.
Men have thanked me for having then brought home to
their hearts the fundamental truths of the religion of Jesus
as something not hostile to reason, but, on the contrary,
as strengthening them. This has helped them to keep their
religion later in life.

In these classes of religious instruction I first became
conscious of how much of the schoolmaster’s blood I had
in me from my ancestors.

My stipend at St. Nicholai was one hundred marks (fifty
dollars) a month, but it sufficed for my needs, as my board
and lodging at the St. Thomas hostel were very cheap.

One great advantage of my position there was that it left
me plenty of time for scholarly pursuits and for music. The
thoughtfulness of the two ministers made it possible for me
to leave Strasbourg when the children were on their spring
and fall vacations. I had only to provide for a substitute
preacher, and when nobody else was available, they were
kind enough to preach themselves. Thus I had three months
out of the year free, one after Easter and two in the fall.
The spring holiday I usually spent in Paris in order to
continue my studies with Widor. The autumn I spent for
the most part in my parents’ home at Gvinsbach.

During these extended visits to Paris I made many val-
uable acquaintances. Romain Rolland I met for the first

The First Years in Strasbourg 29

time around 1905, and in the beginning we were merely
musicians to each other. Gradually, however, we discov-
ered that we were humans too, and we became good
friends.

With Henri Lichtenberger, the sensitive French con-
noisseur of German literature, I developed a warm friend-
ship. Robert Minder, my student in music and philosophy,
became his successor in Strasbourg after 1918.

I shall never forget a chance encounter I had one de-
lightful spring morning at the beginning of the century in
the narrow rue St. -Jacques. As I was late for an appoint-
ment, I had to take a cab. At one street crossing the two
lines of vehicles had to remain stationary side by side for
some time, and I was attracted by the head of the occupant
of the open carriage alongside mine. I noticed that the
elegant tall hat — at that time the tall hat was still worn in
Paris — looked odd upon the anything-but-elegant head.
But while I continued to look — for we had to wait a con-
siderable time — I fell under the spell of the uncanny some-
thing, which was the very reverse of spiritual, that
characterized the face. Such indications of untamed pri-
mitive human nature, features expressing reckless and re-
morseless willpower, I had never seen before in any human
being. While I was staring, it suddenly dawned on me that
it was Clemenceau.

When I learned later that after three sittings Cezanne
had given up the task of painting Clemenceau because he
“couldn’t make a portrait of a thing like that,” I thoroughly
understood what he meant.

During the first years of the new century I delivered a
series of lectures, in German, on German literature and
philosophy before the Foreign Language Society of Paris.

30 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

I still remember those on Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Ger-
hart Hauptmann, Sudermann, and Goethe’s Faust. In Au-
gust 1900, while I was working on the lecture on Nietzsche,
the news came that death had at last released him from his
sufferings.

My life was simple in those years, which were decisive
for my creative work. I worked a great deal, with unbroken
concentration but without haste.

I did not travel much, because I had neither the time
nor the money. In 1900 I accompanied my aunt, the wife
of my father’s eldest brother, to Oberammergau. The won-
derful landscape behind the stage actually made a stronger
impression on me than the Passion play. I was bothered
by the staging of the essential action of the Passion in pic-
torial scenes from the Old Testament, by the excessively
theatrical display, by the imperfections of the text, and by
the banality of the music. What touched me deeply was
the pious fervor with which the actors immersed them-
selves in the parts they played.

We cannot help but feel dissatisfied with a Passion play
that was meant to be performed, using simple methods, by
villagers for villagers and as a religious service, but is forced
out of this mold by a flood of foreign spectators and turned
into a stage play that must satisfy the demands of all those
who see it. Anyone sensitive to the spiritual side of life
must admit that the people of Oberammergau make every
effort to perform this Passion play, even with its changes,
in the simple spirit in which it was originally conceived.

When my finances permitted, I made the pilgrimage to
Bayreuth in those years the festival took place. Cosima
Wagner, whom I had met in Strasbourg while working on
my book on Bach, made a deep impression on me. She

The First Years in Strasbourg 31

became interested in my idea that Bach’s music is descrip-
tive. Once, when she visited the eminent church historian
Johannes Ficker in Strasbourg, she asked me to illustrate
my view by playing some of Bach’s choral preludes on the
fine Merklin organ in the new church. She also, on that
occasion, gave me interesting details about the religious
instruction she had received in her youth and later, after
she had decided to convert to Protestantism. However
often we met I was never able to overcome my shyness in
the presence of this noble, highly artistic, extraordinary
woman.

In Siegfried Wagner I valued the simplicity and the mod-
esty that characterized this man so very talented in so many
fields. No one who saw him at work in Bayreuth could help
but admire him, both for what he did and for the way in
which he did it. His music too contains much that is truly
significant and beautiful.

Study of the Last
Supper and the Life
of Jesus, 1900-1902

After finishing my work on Kant, when
I returned to theology it would have
been natural for me to take up my stud-
ies of the problems of the life of Jesus,
which had occupied me since my first
student days. I could have gathered
the material and developed it into a
dissertation. My studies of the Last
Supper had, however, broadened my
views and my interests. The research
on the life of Jesus had led me to re-
search on primitive Christianity. The
problem of the Last Supper belongs,
of course, to both of these subjects. It

The Last Supper 33

stands at the center of the development of the faith of Jesus
and of primitive Christianity.

If, I said to myself, the origin and significance of the Last
Supper remain an enigma for us, we apparently do not
understand the world of thought of the times of Jesus and
of early Christianity. In addition, we cannot grasp the real
problems of the faith of Jesus and of primitive Christianity
because we do not regard them as based on the Last Supper
and baptism.

Guided by these considerations, I conceived the idea of
writing a history of the Last Supper as it related both to
the life of Jesus and to the history of primitive Christianity.
A preliminary investigation was meant to define my position
regarding previous research into the question of the Last
Supper and to throw light upon the problem as a whole.
A second part would describe the thought and activities of
Jesus as conditions for understanding the last supper that
He celebrated with His disciples. A third part was to treat
the Last Supper in the primitive Church and in the first
two centuries of Christianity.

For my work on the problem of the Last Supper, I ob-
tained my degree in theology (the diploma of licentiate in
theology) on July 21, 1900. Its second part, on the mystery
of the Messiahship and the Passion, served as qualification
to teach as privatdozent at the university in 1902.

When the third study, devoted to the Last Supper in
primitive Christianity, and the fourth, on the history of
baptism in the New Testament and primitive Christian-
ity, were completed, I used them in my course lectures.
Neither has been published. The Quest of the Historical
Jesus, which I originally considered a supplement to a
sketch on the life of Jesus, grew into a large volume and

34 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

prevented the preparation of other studies for publica-
tion.

After this came a new interruption: the book on Bach
and, after that, my medical studies. When, near the con-
clusion of these studies, I could find time once more to
devote to theology, I decided to write a history of scholarly
research into the thought of the Apostle Paul. This would
then be a companion volume to The Quest of the Historical
Jesus and an introduction to an exposition of Pauline doc-
trine.

On the strength of my newly won understanding of the
teachings of Jesus and Paul, I intended to complete a history
of the origin and early development of Christianity and the
Last Supper and baptism. I had planned to do this after
my first stay in Africa, when, after one and a half or two
years, I would have leave in Europe. This plan, however,
was ruined by the war, which only allowed me to return
to Europe after four and a half years in Africa, and then in
bad health and deprived of my livelihood.

In the meantime another project interfered: I had begun
to work on The Philosophy of Civilization. Consequently,
“The History of the Last Supper and Baptism in the Early
Christian Period” has remained in manuscript form for my
lectures. The thoughts that underlie it are put forward in
my book The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle.

In my work on the problem of the Last Supper I examined
the various solutions that had been offered by theologians
up to the end of the nineteenth century. At the same time
I attempted to reveal its true character. In the course of
my studies it became evident that the solutions offered to
explain the early Christian celebration of the distribution

The Last Supper 35

of bread and wine are impossible. Repetition of the words
of Jesus cannot turn bread and wine into His body and
blood.

The celebration as practiced in early Christendom was
something other than a sacramental repetition or symbolical
representation of the atoning death of Jesus. That inter-
pretation of the last meal of Jesus with His disciples was
added much later, in the Catholic Mass and in the Prot-
estant celebration of the Last Supper, as a symbol of the
forgiveness of sins.

The words of Jesus about bread and wine as His body
and blood did not — strange as the statement may seem to
us — determine the nature of the celebration for the dis-
ciples and the first believers. According to our knowledge
of primitive Christianity, those words were not repeated at
the community meal in the beginning. What constituted
the celebration, then, was not Jesus’ words of the so-called
institution, which spoke of bread and wine as His body and
blood, but the prayers of thanksgiving over the bread and
wine. These gave both to the last supper of Jesus with His
disciples and to the solemn meal of the early Christian
community a meaning that pointed toward the expected
Messianic meal.

This explains why the celebration of the Last Supper
is called “Eucharist,” that is, a “Thanksgiving.” It was
celebrated not once a year on the evening of Maundy
Thursday but in the early hours every Sunday, to sig-
nify the day of the resurrection of Jesus, when believers
looked forward to His return and the coming of the King-
dom of God.

In the sketch on the life of Jesus, published under the title
The Secret of Jesus’ Messiahship and Passion, I presented
the nineteenth-century views of the early public activities
and sermons of Jesus. These were accepted as historically
authentic, and were confirmed in detail by Holtzmann in

36 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

his work on the Gospels. His views are based upon two
fundamental ideas: first, that Jesus did not share the naive,
realistic expectation of the return of the Messiah, which
was at that time widespread among the Jewish people; and
that it was owing to the failures He experienced after some
initial successes that He decided to submit to His suffering
and death.

Theological scholarship of the second half of the nine-
teenth century held that Jesus tries to divert the attention
of believers from the supernatural Messianic Kingdom they
expect by proclaiming an ethical Kingdom of God in this
world. Accordingly, He does not hold Himself to be the
Messiah of His hearers’ imagination but tries to instill in
them a belief in a spiritual, ethical Messiah, who will enable
them to recognize the Messiah in Him.

At first His preaching was successful. Later on, however,
the multitude, influenced by the Pharisees and the rulers
at Jerusalem, falls away from Him. As he realizes this, he
accepts that it is the will of God that, for the sake of the
Kingdom of God and in order to establish His own spiritual
Messiahship, he must die. Thus the next Easter he travels
to Jerusalem to surrender Himself to suffering and death
on the cross.

This view of the thought and decisions of Jesus is unten-
able, because its two fundamental ideas do not correspond
to facts. Nowhere in the oldest sources, the Gospels of Mark
and Matthew, is there any indication that Jesus wanted to
replace the realistic view of a future supernatural Kingdom
of God, as it was held by the people of that time, with a
spiritualized Kingdom. Nor do those Gospels say anything
about a successful period of activity being followed by an
unsuccessful one.

As shown by the sayings Mark and Matthew ascribe to
Him, Jesus lives in the Messianic expectation, held by late
Judaism, that goes back to the old prophets and to the Book

The Last Supper 37

of Daniel, a book which came into existence around 165
b.c. We know of this expectation from the Book of Enoch
(ca. 100 B.C.), the Psalms of Solomon (63 B.C.), and the
Apocalypses of Baruch and Ezra (ca. a.d. 80).

Like His contemporaries, Jesus identifies the Messiah
with the “Son of Man,” who is mentioned in the Book of
Daniel, and who speaks of His coming on the clouds of
heaven. The Kingdom of God He preaches is the heavenly
Messianic Kingdom, which will be established on earth
when the Son of Man comes at the end of the natural world.
He constantly exhorts His listeners to be ready at any mo-
ment for the judgment, as a result of which some will enter
into the glory of the Messianic Kingdom while others will
face damnation. He even offers His disciples the prospect
of sitting, at this judgment, on twelve seats around His
throne and judging the twelve tribes of Israel.

Jesus accepts, then, as true the late Jewish Messianic
expectation in all its realistic aspects. In no way does He
attempt to spiritualize it. But He fills it with His own
powerful ethical spirit, passing beyond the Law and the
scribes. He demands from men the practice of the abso-
lute ethic of love as proof that they belong to God and to
the Messiah and will be elected to membership in the
coming Kingdom. In the Sermon on the Mount he an-
nounces who is predestined to receive future blessings: the
simple, the merciful, the peacemakers, the pure in heart,
those who hunger and thirst after the justice of the King-
dom of God, the mourners, those who suffer persecution
for the Kingdom of God’s sake, those who become as little
children.

The error of earlier research is that it attributes to Jesus
a spiritualizing of the late Jewish Messianic expectation,
whereas in reality He simply introduces into it the ethical
religion of love. Our minds refuse at first to grasp that a
religiousness and an ethic so deep and spiritual can be

38 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

combined with other views so naively realistic. But the
combination is a fact.

Against the hypothesis that there are two phases in the
activity of Jesus, a successful period and an unsuccessful,
we can point to the fact that in His last period in Galilee,
as well as at the Temple in Jerusalem, enthusiastic crowds
gathered around Him. Surrounded by his followers, He is
protected against His enemies. With their support He can
even venture in His discourses at the Temple to attack the
Pharisees, and to drive the traders and the money changers
out of it.

When, after the return of the disciples whom He had
sent on a mission to proclaim the coming of the Kingdom
of God, He goes with them to the heathen region of Tyre
and Sidon, He is not motivated by a need to withdraw from
His enemies. The people do not leave Him; on the contrary,
He retires to have some time alone with those closest to
Him. As soon as He appears again in Galilee, the crowd of
His adherents gathers round Him. It is at the head of the
Galilean pilgrims on their way to the Easter celebration
that He enters Jerusalem. His arrest and crucifixion are
only possible because He Himself surrenders to the au-
thorities. They condemn Him during the night, and in the
early morning, almost before Jerusalem is awake, he is
already crucified.

Following the precise statements of the two oldest Gospels,
I counter the untenable earlier interpretations of the life
of Jesus with a new concept: I show that His thought, word,
and action were based on His expectation that the end of
the world was near and that the Kingdom of God would be
revealed. This interpretation is called “eschatological”
(from the Greek word eschatos, meaning “the last”) and it
is in accordance with the traditional Jewish-Christian doc-
trine concerning the events leading to the end of the world.

The Last Supper 39

If we look at the life of Jesus in this way — and we must
remember that our factual knowledge is limited to His pub-
lic appearances and His end — then we see the following:
Just as Jesus announces the Kingdom of God not as some-
thing already beginning but as something of the future, He
does not think that He is already the Messiah. He is con-
vinced that only at the appearance of the Messianic King-
dom, when those predestined enter the supernatural ex-
istence intended for them, will He be manifested as the
Messiah. This knowledge about His future dignity remains
His secret. To the people He presents Himself only as the
One who announces the imminent coming of the Kingdom
of God. His listeners do not have to know who He is. When
the Kingdom of God comes, they will realize it. The knowl-
edge of who He is has manifested itself only to those who
recognize Him, as the disciples have done, and who accept
His message of the Kingdom of God. He promises that the
Son of Man (to whom He refers in the third person, as if
He were not identical with Him) will recognize them im-
mediately as His own.

For Himself and those who look with Him for the im-
minent coming of the Kingdom of God, Jesus expects that
they will first have to endure together the pre-Messianic
Tribulation and then prove themselves faithful. For ac-
cording to the late Jewish teaching about events at the end
of the world, all those who are called to the Messianic
Kingdom will, immediately before this takes place, suffer
for some time at the mercy of the God-opposing powers of
this world.

At some point in time — whether it was weeks or months
after His appearance in public we do not know — Jesus feels
certain that the hour for the coming of the Kingdom has
arrived. He hastily sends out His disciples two by two into
the cities of Israel that they may spread the news. In the
instructions he gives them (Matthew 10), He warns them

40 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

to expect the Messianic Tribulation which is immediately
about to dawn and bring upon them and the other elect
ones fierce persecution, yes, perhaps death itself. He does
not expect to see them return to Him but assures them
that the “coming of the Son of Man” (which is expected to
be simultaneous with the manifestation of the Kingdom)
will take place even before they have visited all the cities
of Israel.

His expectation, however, is not fulfilled. The disciples
return without having suffered any persecution whatever.
Of the pre-Messianic Tribulation there is no sign, and the
Messianic Kingdom does not appear. Jesus can explain this
fact to Himself only by supposing that there is still some
event that must take place first.

The perception dawns on Him that the Kingdom of God
can only come when He, as the Messiah-to-be, has by
suffering and death made atonement for those who have
been elected to the Kingdom, and thereby saved them from
the necessity of going through the pre-Messianic Tribula-
tion.

Jesus has always counted on the possibility that God, in
His mercy, might spare the elect the pre-Messianic suf-
fering. In the Lord’s Prayer, which is a prayer about the
coming of the Kingdom of God, believers are bidden to
pray that God not lead them into “temptation” but deliver
them from “Evil.” By this “temptation” Jesus does not mean
any individual temptation to commit sin. He refers to the
persecution that will take place, with the authorization of
God, at the end of time. Believers will have to suffer this
at the hands of “the Evil One,” Satan, who represents the
powers that oppose God.

The thought, then, with which Jesus meets death is that
God is willing to accept His self-chosen death as an atone-
ment made for believers. In this way the believers do not
suffer the pre-Messianic tribulations in which through suf-

The Last Supper 41

fering and death they would be purified and prove them-
selves worthy to enter the Kingdom of God.

The resolution of Jesus to suffer an atoning death is also
based upon the passages in Isaiah about the Servant of
Jehovah (Isaiah 53) who suffers for the sins of others without
their understanding the significance of what He endures.
Originally, these passages from Isaiah, from the period of
the Jewish exile, referred to the suffering inflicted on Israel
by other people at that time. By enduring their suffering
as “Servants of God,” the people of Israel would then bring
other people to recognize the true God.

When Jesus and His disciples were in the area of Cae-
sarea Philippi, He reveals to them the necessity of suffering
and death for Him who was destined to be the Messiah.
At the same time He discloses to them that He is “the Son
of Man” (Mark 8:27-33). Then at Eastertime He goes up
with the crowds of Galileans to Jerusalem. The rejoicing at
His entry into Jerusalem is not for the Messiah but for the
prophet of Nazareth, of the House of David. The treason
of Judas consists not in betraying to the Sanhedrin where
Jesus can be arrested but in disclosing His claim to be the
Messiah.

At the last supper He takes with His disciples. He gives
them to eat and to drink bread and wine that He has con-
secrated by prayers of thanksgiving. He declares that He
will no longer drink of the fruit of the vine until that day
when He will drink it again in His Father’s Kingdom. Thus
at His last earthly meal He blesses them as His companions
at the coming Messianic meal. From that time onward be-
lievers carry within them the assurance that they are invited
to the Messianic meal, and gather together for ceremonial
meals with food and drink and prayers of thanksgiving.

Through this continuation of the Last Supper they hope
to hasten the coming of the Kingdom of God. Jesus, then,
expects that through his atoning death the Messianic King-

42 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

dom will come about without any preliminary suffering. He
tells His judges that they will see Him as the Son of Man
seated on the right hand of God and coming on the clouds
of heaven (Mark 14:62). Since on the morning after the
Sabbath the disciples find the grave empty and, in their
enthusiastic expectation of the glory in which their Master
is soon to appear, have visions of Him risen from the grave,
they are certain that He is with God in heaven, and that
he will soon appear as the Messiah and usher in the King-
dom of God.

What the two oldest Gospels report of the public life of
Jesus takes place in the course of one year. In the spring,
with the parable of the sower, Jesus begins to proclaim the
secret of the Kingdom of God. At harvesttime He is hoping
that the heavenly harvest, like the earthly one, will begin
and He sends out the disciples to make a final proclamation
of the nearness of the Kingdom (Matthew 9:37ff). Shortly
after that, He abandons His public activity and retires with
His disciples to heathen territory in the neighborhood of
Caesarea Philippi, probably until around Easter, when He
joins a group of pilgrims from Galilee on their journey to
Jerusalem. It is possible, then, that the period of His public
activity lasted at most five or six months.

Teaching Activities
at the University of
Strasbourg.

The Quest of the
Historical Jesus

On March 1, 1902, I delivered my in-
augural lecture before the theological
faculty at Strasbourg on the Logos doc-
trine in the fourth Gospel.

Later I learned that protests against
my acceptance as a university lecturer
had been lodged by two members of
the faculty. They expressed disap-
proval of my method of historical in-
vestigation and fear that I should
confuse the students with my views.
They were not successful, however,
as they could not stand up to the au-
thority of Holtzmann, who took my
side.

43

44 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

In the inaugural lecture, I showed that the obscure pas-
sages in the discourses of the Johannine Christ hang to-
gether, though they do not become intelligible until they
are recognized as being indications by which Christ pre-
pares His hearers to accept the sacraments as deriving their
power from the Logos. Only later did I have an opportunity
to develop this theory fully in my book The Mysticism of
Paul the Apostle.

In the summer term of 1902, I began my lectures with
a course on the Epistles of Timothy and Titus, the so-called
pastoral Epistles.

The inspiration for studying the history of research into
the life of Jesus came from a conversation with students
who had attended a course of lectures by Professor Spitta
on the life of Jesus, but who knew practically nothing about
previous research on the subject. I therefore resolved, with
Professor Holtzmann’s approval, to lecture for two hours
weekly during the summer term of 1905 on the history of
research on the life of Jesus. I began the task with great
zeal. The subject soon captivated me so completely that I
devoted all my energy to its pursuit. Thanks to bequests
from Edouard Reuss and other Strasbourg theologians, the
university library possessed a virtually complete collection
of literature on the life of Jesus. In addition, the library
held nearly all the controversial writings provoked by the
publications of Strauss’s and Renan’s lives. There was
hardly another place in the world where circumstances
could have been so favorable for studying the history of
research on the life of Jesus.

While I was engaged in this work, I was director of the
Collegium Wilhelmitanum (the seminary of St. Thomas).
Immediately after the death of Erichson, I had been made

Teaching at Strasbourg 45

acting director for the period May 1 to September 30, 1901,
when Gustav Anrich — at that time pastor at Lingolsheim
near Strasbourg — would take over those duties. In the sum-
mer of 1903, however, Anrich was appointed professor of
Church History as successor to Ernst Lucius, who had died
suddenly, so on October 1, 1903, I was in turn appointed
director and given the beautiful quarters overlooking the
sunny St. Thomas embankment and a yearly stipend of two
thousand marks. For my study I kept the old room I had
occupied as a student. While Gustav Anrich had been di-
rector, I had lived in town.

The Quest of the Historical Jesus appeared as early as 1906,
the first edition bearing the subtitle From Reimarus to
Wrede.

Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694-1768) was professor
of Oriental languages at Hamburg. His treatise The Aims
of Jesus and His Disciples was the first attempt to explain
the life of Christ based on the hypothesis that Jesus shared
the eschatological Messianic expectations of his contem-
poraries. The treatise was first published by Lessing after
the death of Reimarus as Wolfenbiittler Fragmente without
mentioning the author’s name.

William Wrede (1859-1907), professor of theology at
Breslau, in his treatise The Messianic Secret of the Gospels
made the first solid attempt to deny that Jesus entertained
any eschatological ideas at all. From there, he was led to
the further assumption that Jesus did not regard himself as
the Messiah and that his disciples did not proclaim Him as
such until after His death.

Since Reimarus and Wrede represent the two poles of

46 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

my research, I chose their names for the subtitle of my
book.

After I had worked through the numerous lives of Jesus,
I found it very difficult to organize them into chapters. After
vain attempts to do this on paper, I piled all the “lives” in
one big heap in the middle of my room, selected a place
for each of the chapters in a corner or between the pieces
of furniture, and then, after considerable thought, sorted
the volumes into the piles to which they belonged. I
pledged myself to find a place for every book in some pile,
and then to leave each heap undisturbed in its place until
the corresponding chapter in the manuscript was finished.
I followed this plan to the very end. For many months
people who visited me had to thread their way across the
room along paths that ran between heaps of books. I had
also to ensure that the tidying zeal of the trusty Wiirttem-
berg widow who kept house for me halted before it reached
the piles of books.

The first representatives of the historical-critical method
who pursued research into the life of Jesus had to struggle
with the task of exploring the existence of Jesus using purely
historical means and to examine critically the Gospels that
served as sources of information. Gradually they came to
recognize that Jesus’ understanding of His mission could
be researched through a historical and critical analysis of
the available information about His teaching and His deeds.

The lives of Jesus written in the eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries depict Jesus as the Master who en-
lightens His people and seeks to lead them from the non-
spiritual religion of the Jews to a faith in the God of love
and a spiritual Kingdom of God that is established on this

Teaching at Strasbourg 47

earth through the Messiah. They endeavor to explain all
the miracles of Jesus as natural events misunderstood by
the multitude, and thus they try to put an end to all belief
in the miraculous. The most famous of these rationalistic
lives of Jesus is that of Karl Heinrich Venturini: A Non-
Supernatural History of the Great Prophet of Nazareth,
which in the years 1800 to 1802 appeared anonymously in
German at “Bethlehem” (in reality Copenhagen) in four
volumes comprising twenty-seven hundred pages. No one
of that period took any notice at all of the attempt Reimarus
made to understand the preaching of Jesus from the stand-
point of the eschatological Messianic doctrine of late Ju-
daism.

Genuine historical research begins with critical analysis
of the Gospels to determine the historical value of their ac-
counts. This effort, which began in the nineteenth century
and continued for several decades, had the following re-
sults: The picture given by the Gospel of John is irrecon-
cilable with that of the other three; the other three are the
older and therefore the more credible sources; the material
they have in common with one another is found in its ear-
liest form in the Gospel of Mark; and, finally, Luke’s Gospel
is considerably later than those of Mark and Matthew.

Research into the life of Jesus found itself in a difficult
situation when David Friedrich Strauss (1808-1874), in his
Life of Jesus, published in 1835, accepted only a small
portion of what the two oldest Gospels report about Jesus.
According to him, most of the accounts are of a mythical
character, which gradually came into existence in primitive
Christianity. Most of these narratives go back to passages
relating to the Messiah in the Old Testament.

Finally, when Strauss questions the credibility of the two
oldest narratives, it is not because he is by nature a skeptic.
He does so because he is the first to realize how difficult
it is to understand the details the Evangelists give of Jesus’
public life and preaching.

48 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

From the middle of the nineteenth century onward, a
modem historical view gradually developed, holding that
Jesus attempted to spiritualize the realistic Messianic hopes
of contemporary Judaism by coming forward as a spiritual
Messiah and founder of an ethical Kingdom of God. When
He saw that the people did not understand Him and with-
drew, He resolved to die for His cause, and in this way to
carry it to victory.

Of the presentations of the life of Jesus that share this
concept, the best known are those of Ernest Renan (1863),
Theodore Keim (three volumes, 1867; 1871; 1872), Karl
Hase (1876), and Oscar Holtzmann (1901). Heinrich Julius
Holtzmann attempted to provide a scholarly basis for this
interpretation in his books on the first three Gospels. The
most lively presentation of this modernized theory about
Jesus is to be found in Hamack’s What Is Christianity?
(1901).

As early as 1860 the various investigations into the prob-
lems of the life of Jesus began to make it clear that the view
that represents Him as trying to spiritualize the eschato-
logical Messianic expectations of His time cannot be sus-
tained. In a series of passages He speaks in a quite realistic
way of the coming of the Son of Man and the Messianic
Kingdom when this world comes to an end. If one abandons
the reinterpretation or rejects these passages, two alter-
natives remain: either to recognize and admit that Jesus
really did live with a belief in the ideas of late Jewish
eschatology or to assert that only those sayings are genuine
in which He speaks in a truly spiritual way of the Messiah
and the Messianic Kingdom. The remainder must then
have been attributed to Him by a primitive Christianity
that had reverted to the realistic views of late Judaism.

Faced by these alternatives, research at first decided for
the second. That Jesus should be thought to have shared
the Messianic ideas of late Judaism, which are so alien to
our ideas, seemed so incomprehensible and so shocking

Teaching at Strasbourg 49

that one preferred to doubt the trustworthiness of the two
oldest Gospels and to deny the authenticity of a portion of
the sayings they report.

But when this theory endeavors, as in the works of Tim-
othy Colani ( Jesus Christ et les croyances messianiques de
son temps, 1864) and Gustave Volkmar ( Jesus Nazarenus,
1882), to establish this distinction between genuine “spir-
itual Messianic” and spurious “eschatological Messianic”
pronouncements, it must be denied that Jesus ever be-
lieved Himself to be the Messiah. For the passages in which
He entrusts to His disciples the secret that He is the Mes-
siah are, one and all, “eschatological Messianic,” in that,
according to them. He holds Himself to be the person who
at the end of the world will appear as the Son of Man.

The question of whether Jesus thought eschatologically
or not leads therefore to one point: Did He consider Him-
self to be the Messiah or not? Anyone who admits that He
did must also admit that His ideas and expectations con-
formed to the eschatological views of late Judaism. Anyone
who refuses to recognize this Jewish element in His thought
must also refuse to attribute to Him any consciousness of
being the Messiah.

That is the conclusion William Wrede drew in his work
The Messianic Secret of the Gospels (1901). He developed
the idea that Jesus presented Himself only as the Master and
that after His death He became the Messiah in the imagin-
ation of His disciples. Only at a later stage of primitive
Christianity was the idea introduced that Jesus did not
reveal Himself as the Messiah but guarded it as a secret.

To doubt the eschatological Messianic statements of Jesus
leads, then, with inexorable logic to the conclusion that
there is nothing in the two oldest Gospels which can be
accepted as historical beyond a few quite general reports
about the teaching activities of a certain Jesus of Nazareth.
Rather than become prey to such radicalism, scholarship
resigned itself to the necessity of recognizing eschatological

50 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

Messianic ideas in Jesus’ thought. Toward the end of the
nineteenth century, the idea of the eschatological character
of the message of Jesus and the thought that Jesus was
aware of His role as Messiah gained increasing recognition.
This view was especially well articulated by the Heidelberg
theologian Johannes Weiss in his book The Sermons of Jesus
Concerning the Kingdom of God (1892). Nevertheless, his-
torical theology secretly hoped not to have to admit that
Weiss could have been correct. In reality, however, the-
ology had to go further. Weiss had gone only partway. He
realized that Jesus thought eschatologically but did not con-
clude from this that His actions were also determined by
eschatology. Weiss explained the course of Jesus’ activity
and His resolution to die using the hypothesis that He was
initially successful and later a failure. For a historical un-
derstanding of the life of Jesus, however, it is necessary to
consider that Jesus’ actions cannot be explained through
ordinary psychology, but solely on the basis of eschatolog-
ical concepts.

I developed this eschatological solution to the prob-
lems of the life of Jesus in my work The Quest of the His-
torical Jesus. Earlier, in 1901, 1 had already sketched out
these thoughts in The Secret of Jesus’ Messiahship and
Passion.

Because this eschatological solution succeeds in making
the thoughts, words, and acts of Jesus consistent and com-
prehensible, it shows that many passages in the Gospels,
which had been considered apocryphal in the past, were
indeed intelligible and completely authentic.

In this way the eschatological interpretation of the life of
Jesus puts an end to any need to doubt the credibility of
the Gospels of Mark and Matthew. It shows that their ac-
counts of the public activity and death of Jesus follow a
faithful tradition that is reliable even in its details. If some
elements of this tradition are obscure or confusing, the
explanation lies chiefly in the fact that in a number of in-

Teaching at Strasbourg 51

stances the disciples themselves did not understand the
sayings and actions of their Master.

After the publication of my Quest of the Historical Jesus a
friendly exchange of letters began between William Wrede
and myself. It moved me deeply to learn from him that he
suffered from an incurable heart disease and might expect
death at any moment. “Subjectively I am tolerably well;
objectively my condition is hopeless,” he wrote in one of
the last letters I received from him. The thought that I
could work without thinking of my health while he had to
give up his work in the best years of his life troubled me
deeply. The tribute I had paid in my book to his achieve-
ments perhaps compensated a little for the hostility he had
encountered in response to his courageous search for the
truth. He died in 1907.

To my astonishment my work met at once with recog-
nition in England. The first to make my views known there
was Professor William Sanday of Oxford in his lectures on
the problems of the life of Jesus. Unfortunately I could not
accept his invitation to come to England because I had no
time. I was studying medicine by then and just at that
time, in addition to the preparation of my theological lec-
tures, was at work on the German edition of my book on
Bach, which had originally been written in French. Thus
I missed a second opportunity to become acquainted with
England.

In Cambridge Professor Francis Crawford Burkitt cham-
pioned my work and secured its publication in English.
The excellent translation was made by his pupil, the Rev-
erend W. Montgomery. My exchanges with these two men
soon led to a warm friendship.

While Professor Burkitt saw my views from a purely

52 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

scientific perspective, they met with Dr. Sanday’s approval
because they supported his own religious position. The
modem image of Jesus as represented by the liberal school
of Protestants did not agree with his Catholic leanings. I
do not here criticize liberal Protestantism, to which I myself
subscribe, but I disagree with some of its representatives,
such as Colani and Wrede, already challenged by other
liberals, for example Sabatier, Menegoz, and Gognel.

My work also had significance for George Tyrrell. With-
out scientific documentation of the view that the thought
and the actions of Jesus were conditioned by eschatology,
he would not have been able, in his Christianity at the
Cross-Roads (1910), to portray Jesus as the ethical Apoc-
alyptic who by His very nature was not Protestant but
Catholic.

The Historical Jesus
and the Christianity
of Today

As my two books on the life of Jesus
gradually became known, the question
was put to me from all sides: What can
the eschatological Jesus, who lives ex-
pecting the end of the world and a su-
pernatural Kingdom of God, be to us?
I myself had always been preoccupied
with this question during my studies
for my books. The satisfaction, which
I could not help feeling, of having
solved so many historical riddles about
the existence of Jesus was accom-
panied by the painful awareness that
this new knowledge in the realm of
history would mean unrest and diffi-

53

54 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

culty for Christian piety. I comforted myself, however, with
the words of St. Paul that had been familiar to me from
childhood: “We can do nothing against the truth, but for
the truth” (2 Corinthians 13:8).

Since the essential nature of the spiritual is truth, every
new truth represents a gain. Truth is under all circum-
stances more valuable than nontruth, and this must apply
to truth in the realm of history as well as to other kinds of
truth. Even if it comes in a guise that piety finds strange
and which at first creates difficulties, the final result can
never be harmful. It can only mean a deeper piety. Religion
has, therefore, nothing to fear from a confrontation with
historical truth.

How strong would Christian truth stand in the world
today if its relationship to truth in history were in every
respect what it should be! Instead of acknowledging its
rights, whenever historical truth was embarrassing, it was
presented in some guise, consciously or unconsciously
twisted, falsified, or denied. Today Christianity finds itself
in a situation where pursuing historical truth freely is dif-
ficult because it has been neglected again and again in the
past.

For example, we find ourselves in an awkward position
because the early Christians published the writings of the
Apostles without being sure of their authenticity. For gen-
erations this issue has been a source of sensitive debate.
Some feel that, in view of the abundance of material, one
cannot exclude the possibility that passages in the New
Testament are not authentic in spite of the valuable content
in them that we have learned to love. On the other side,
there are those who want to save the reputation of early
Christianity by stressing that this hypothesis cannot be

The Historical Jesus and the Christianity of Today 55

proven. Yet those who were responsible for this debate
were scarcely aware of doing anything wrong. They only
followed the general custom of antiquity, which consisted
in attributing to famous people works that in reality were
not their own but expressed their ideas. Because I have
studied the history of early Christianity and often had oc-
casion to see the deficiencies concerning historical truth, I
have become an ardent defender of the truth in our Chris-
tianity today.

Ideally, Jesus would have preached religious truth in a
timeless way and in terms accessible to all succeeding gen-
erations. That, however, He did not do, and there is no
doubt a reason for it.

We must therefore reconcile ourselves to the fact that
Jesus’ religion of love made its appearance as part of a
system of thought that anticipated the imminent end of the
world. We cannot make His images our own. We must
transpose them into our modern concepts of the world. We
have done this somewhat covertly until now.

In spite of what the words of the text said, we managed
to interpret Jesus’ teaching as if it were in agreement with
our own worldview. Today, however, it is evident that we
cannot adapt the teachings of Jesus to our modern concepts:
we must find some method of interpretation legitimized by
necessity. We must then recognize that religious truth can
also pass through various stages.

How is this to be understood? So far as its essential
spiritual and ethical nature is concerned, Christianity’s re-
ligious truth remains the same through the centuries. There
are only exterior changes caused by different worldviews.

56 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

Thus Jesus’ religion of love, which made its first appearance
within the framework of late Jewish eschatological expec-
tation, continues in the late Greek, the medieval, and the
modern views of the world. Throughout the centuries it
remains the same. Whether it is interpreted in terms of
one or another system of thought is of secondary impor-
tance. What is decisive is solely the influence that the spir-
itual and ethical truth of this religion has had on mankind
from its beginning.

Unlike those who listened to the sermons of Jesus, we
of today do not expect to see a Kingdom of God that realizes
itself in supernatural events. We believe that it can only
come into existence through the power of the spirit of Jesus
working in our hearts and in the world. The one important
thing is that we be as thoroughly dominated by the idea of
the Kingdom of God as Jesus required His followers to be.

Jesus introduced into the late Jewish Messianic expec-
tation the powerful idea, expressed in the Beatitudes of the
Sermon on the Mount, that we may come to know God
and belong to Him through love. Jesus is not concerned
with spiritualizing realistic ideas of the Kingdom of God
and of blessedness. But the spirituality that is the life of
this religion of love purifies like a flame all ideas that come
into contact with it. It is the destiny of Christianity to
develop through a constant process of spiritualization.

Jesus never undertakes to expound the late Jewish dog-
mas of the Messiah and the Kingdom. His concern is not
how believers see things, but that they be motivated by
love, without which no one can belong to God and attain
His Kingdom. The Messianic dogma remains in the back-
ground. If He did not happen to mention it now and then,
one could forget that it is presupposed at all. That explains

The Historical Jesus and the Christianity of Today 57

why it was possible for so long to overlook the fact that His
religion of love was conditioned by the times in which He
lived. The late Jewish view of the world, centered in the
expectation of the Messiah, is the crater from which the
flame of the eternal religion of love erupted.

The preacher does not have to expound again and again
the meaning of this or that passage on the Messianic concept
of the end of the world. To bring the message of Jesus to
the men and women of our time, it suffices that they realize
that Jesus Himself lived in expectation of the end of the
world and of a Kingdom of God. But whoever preaches the
Gospel of Jesus to them must explain for himself what His
sayings originally meant, and must work his way through
the historical truth to the eternal. During this process he
will soon realize that the historical circumstances will open
his eyes, that he will for the first time realize all that Jesus
has to say to us.

Many theologians have confirmed my experience that the
Jesus who is known historically, though He speaks to us
from a world of thought other than our own, makes preach-
ing not more difficult but easier. It is profoundly significant
that whenever we hear the sayings of Jesus we have to
enter a realm of thought that is not our own. Our own
affirmative attitude toward the world and toward life con-
stantly threatens to externalize Christianity.

The Gospel of Jesus that tells us to expect the end of the
world turns us away from the path of immediate action
toward service in behalf of the Kingdom of God. It urges
us to seek true strength through detachment from this
world in the spirit of the Kingdom of God. The essence of
Christianity is an affirmation of the world that has passed
through a negation of the world. Within a system of thought

58 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

that denies the world and anticipates its end, Jesus sets up
the eternal ethic of active love!

If the historical Jesus has something strange about Him,
His personality as it really is still has a much stronger in-
fluence on us than the Jesus of dogma or critical scholarship.
In dogma His personality loses its liveliness. Scholarship
has so far modernized, and thus reduced, him.

Anyone who ventures to look the historical Jesus straight
in the face and to listen for what He may have to teach him
in His powerful sayings soon ceases to ask what this strange-
seeming Jesus can still be to him. He learns to know Him
as the One who claims authority over him.

The true understanding of Jesus is the understanding of
will acting on will. The true relation to Him is to become
His. Christian piety of any and every sort is valuable only
insofar as it means the surrender of our will to His.

Today Jesus does not require men to be able to grasp
either in word or in thought who He is. He did not think
it necessary to give those who actually heard His sayings
any insight into the secret of His personality, or to disclose
to them the fact that He was that descendant of David who
was one day to be revealed as the Messiah. The one thing
He did require of them was that in both thought and deed
they should prove themselves men who had been com-
pelled by Him to rise from being of this world to being
other than the world, and thereby partakers of His peace.

As I studied and thought about Jesus, all this became
certain in my mind. Because of this, I concluded my Quest
of the Historical Jesus with these words: “As one unknown
and nameless He comes to us, just as on the shore of the

The Historical Jesus and the Christianity of Today 59

lake He approached those men who knew him not. His
words are the same: ‘Follow thou Me!’ and He puts us to
the tasks He has to carry out in our age. He commands.
And to those who obey, be they wise or simple, He will
reveal Himself in the fellowship of peace and activity, of
struggle and suffering, till they come to know, as an inex-
pressible secret, Who He is . .

Many people are shocked upon learning that the historical
Jesus must be accepted as “capable of error” because the
supernatural Kingdom of God, the manifestation of which
He announced as imminent, did not appear. What can we
do in the face of what stands clearly recorded in the Gos-
pels?

Are we acting in the spirit of Jesus if we attempt with
hazardous and sophisticated explanations to force the say-
ings into agreement with the dogmatic teaching of His ab-
solute and universal infallibility? He Himself never made
any claim to such omniscience. Just as He pointed out to
the young man who addressed Him as “Good Master”
(Mark 10:17ff.) that God alone is good, so He would also
have set Himself against those who would have liked to
attribute to Him a divine infallibility. Knowledge of spir-
itual truth cannot be proved by displaying further knowl-
edge about the events of world history and matters of
ordinary life. Its province lies on a different plane from the
knowledge of the affairs of this world, and it is quite in-
dependent of it.

Jesus no doubt fits His teaching into the late Jewish
Messianic dogma. But He does not think dogmatically. He
formulates no doctrine. Nowhere does He demand of His

60 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

hearers that they sacrifice thinking to believing. Quite the
contrary! He bids them to reflect upon religion. Within the
Messianic hopes His hearers carry in their hearts, He kin-
dles the fire of an ethical faith. The truth that the ethical
is the essence of religion is firmly established on the au-
thority of Jesus.

Beyond this, the religion of love taught by Jesus has been
freed from any dogmatism that clung to it with the disap-
pearance of the late Jewish expectation of the immediate
end of the world. The mold in which the casting was made
has been broken. We are now at liberty to let the religion
of Jesus become a living force in our thought, as its purely
spiritual and ethical nature demands. We recognize the
deep values of Christianity as transmitted by early Greek
teaching and kept alive by the piety of many centuries. We
hold fast to the Church with love, reverence, and gratitude.
But we belong to her as men who appeal to the saying of
the Apostle Paul, “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there
is liberty,” and who believe that they serve Christianity
better by the strength of their devotion to Jesus’ religion
of love than by submission to all the articles of faith. If the
Church abides by the spirit of Jesus, there is room in her
for every form of Christian piety, even for that which claims
unrestricted freedom.

I find it no easy task to pursue my vocation, to admonish
Christian faith to come to terms with itself in all sincerity
with historical truth. But I have devoted myself to it with
joy, because I am certain that truthfulness in all things
belongs to the spirit of Jesus.

My Work on Bach

While I was working on The Quest of
the Historical Jesus I finished a book
in French on J. S. Bach. Widor, with
whom I used to spend several weeks
in Paris every spring, and frequently
also in the autumn, had complained
that only biographical works were
available about Bach in French, and
nothing that would introduce people
to his art. I had to promise him that I
would spend the autumn vacation of
1902 writing an essay on the nature of
Bach’s art for the students of the Paris
Conservatory.

This task appealed to me because it

61

62 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

gave me an opportunity to express thoughts at which I had
arrived in the course of my theoretical and practical study
of Bach, as organist to the Bach Society at St. Wilhelm’s.
This society was founded in 1887 by Ernest Miinch, the
organist of the Church of St. Wilhelm, with whom I had
many discussions on the interpretation of Bach. I owe him
much. Charles Miinch, the distinguished conductor, was
his son.

At the end of the vacation, in spite of the most strenuous
work, I had gotten no further than preliminary studies for
the treatise. It had also become clear that this would expand
into a book on Bach. With good courage I resigned myself
to my fate.

In 1903 and 1904 I devoted all my spare time to Bach.
My work was eased by my having acquired a complete
edition of his works, which was at that time rarely available
and then only at a very high price. I was thus no longer
forced to study the scores in the university library, a re-
striction which had been a great hindrance, since I could
hardly find any time for Bach except at night. I happened
to learn at a music shop in Strasbourg of a lady in Paris
who, in order to support the enterprise of the Bach Society,
had been a subscriber to the complete edition. She now
wanted to get rid of the long row of big gray volumes that
took up so much space on her bookshelves. Pleased at being
able to give somebody pleasure with them, she let me have
them for the ridiculously small sum of two hundred marks
(one hundred dollars). This stroke of luck seemed to be a
good omen for the success of my work.

It was, in truth, a very rash undertaking on my part to
start writing a book on Bach. Although, thanks to extensive
reading, I had some knowledge of music history and theory,

My Work on Bach 63

I had not studied music as one studies for a profession.
However, my intention was not to produce new historical
material about Bach and his time. As a musician I wanted
to talk to other musicians about Bach’s music. So I re-
solved that the main subject of my work should be what in
most books hitherto had been too slightly treated, namely
the real nature of Bach’s music and its interpretation.
Biographical and historical aspects are only given as an
introduction.

If the difficulties in treating such a subject made me fear
that I had embarked on a task beyond my powers, I con-
soled myself with the thought that I was not writing for
Germany, the home of Bach scholarship, but for France,
where the art of the Cantor of St. Thomas was yet to be
made known.

To write the book in French at a time when I was also
lecturing and preaching in German was an effort. It is true
that ever since my childhood I have spoken French as
readily as German. I always used French in my letters to
my parents because that was the custom in my family.
German, however, is my mother tongue, because the Al-
satian dialect, which is my native language, is Germanic.

I profited much in my work on Bach by the stylistic
criticism of my manuscript by Hubert Gillot, at that time
a lecturer in French at the University of Strasbourg. He
impressed upon me the fact that the French sentence needs
rhythm in far stronger measure than does the German. I
can best describe the difference between the two languages
by saying that in French I seem to be strolling along the
well-kept paths of a fine park, but in German to be wan-
dering at will in a magnificent forest. Into literary German
new life continually flows from the dialects with which it

64 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

has kept in touch. French has lost this ever fresh contact
with the soil. It is rooted in its literature, and has thereby
become, in the positive as well as the pejorative sense of
the word, something finished, while German in the same
way remains something unfinished. The perfection of
French consists in its being able to express a thought in
the clearest and most concise way; that of German in being
able to present it in its manifold aspects. I consider Rous-
seau’s Social Contract to be the greatest linguistic crea-
tion in French. In German, in my view, Luther’s translation
of the Bible and Nietzsche’s Jenseits von Gut und Bose
(Beyond Good and Evil) come closest to perfection.
Always accustomed in French to be careful about the
rhythmical arrangement of the sentence and to strive for
simplicity of expression, I required the same in German
as well. And now through my work on the French Bach it
became clear to me what literary style corresponded to my
nature.

Like everyone who writes about art, I had to wrestle
with the difficulty of expressing artistic opinions and
impressions in words. When we speak about art, we can
speak only in approximations, in parables.

In the autumn of 1904 I was able to announce to Widor,
who had spurred me on again and again with letters and
who was now in Venice, where he was spending his holiday,
that the undertaking was at last completed. He immediately
wrote the preface, which he had promised me.

The book appeared in 1905, dedicated to Mme Mathilde
Schweitzer, the wife of my father’s eldest brother in Paris.
Had she not enabled me to meet Widor in 1893 and, thanks
to her hospitable house, given me again and again the op-
portunity of being with him, I should never have come to
be writing about Bach.

My Work on Bach 65

I was surprised and delighted that my work met with
recognition even in Germany as a valuable contribution to
the study of Bach, though I had written it merely to fill a
gap in French musical literature. In the journal Kunstwart
(Art Guardian) von Liipke suggested a translation. Con-
sequently, in the autumn of that year, 1905, a German
edition was agreed upon, to be published by Breitkopf und
Hartel.

When in the summer of 1906, after the completion of
The Quest of the Historical Jesus, I turned to work on the
German edition of Bach, I soon realized that it was im-
possible for me to translate it into another language myself,
and that in order to write anything satisfactory, I had to
plunge anew into the original materials of my book. So I
closed the French Bach and resolved to make a new and
better German one. Out of a book of 455 pages there
emerged, to the dismay of the astonished publisher, one
of 844. The first pages of the new work I wrote at Bayreuth
in the Black Horse Inn after a wonderful performance of
Tristan. For weeks I had been trying in vain to get to work.
In the mood of exaltation in which I returned from the
Festival Hill, I succeeded. Accompanied by the babble of
voices from the Bierhalle below, I began to write, and it
was long after sunrise before I laid down my pen. From
that time onward I felt such joy in the work that I concluded
it in two years, although my medical courses, the prepa-
ration of my lectures, my preaching activities, and my con-
cert tours prevented me from working on the manuscript
as much as I would have liked. I frequently had to put it
aside for weeks at a time.

The German edition appeared early in 1908. It is from
this text that Ernest Newman made his splendid translation
into English.

66 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

In their fight against Wagner, the anti-Wagnerites appealed
to the ideal of classical music as they saw it. For them, this
pure music” excluded any poetic or descriptive elements,
and its only intention was to create beautiful harmonies to
absolute perfection. They cited the example of Bach, whose
works had become better known in the second half of the
nineteenth century, thanks to the edition of the Bach So-
ciety at Leipzig. They also claimed Mozart, and they op-
posed Wagner. Bach’s fugues especially seemed to them
the indisputable proof that he served their ideal of pure
music. He was depicted as a classic of this kind by Philipp
Spitta in his important, comprehensive work, the first in
which biographical material was based on careful exami-
nation of sources (1873-1880).

As a contrast to the Bach of pure music I present the
Bach who is a poet and painter in sound. In his music and
in his texts he expresses the emotional as well as the de-
scriptive with great vitality and clarity. Before all else he
aims at rendering the pictorial in lines of sound. He is even
more tone painter than tone poet. His art is nearer to that
of Berlioz than to that of Wagner. If the text speaks of
drifting mists, of boisterous winds, of roaring rivers, of
waves that ebb and flow, of leaves falling from the tree,
of bells that toll for the dying, of the confident faith that
walks with firm steps or the weak faith that falters, of the
proud who will be debased and the humble who will be
exalted, of Satan rising in rebellion, of angels on the
clouds of heaven, then one sees and hears all this in his
music.

Bach has, in fact, his own language of sound. There are
in his music constantly recurring rhythmical motives ex-
pressing peaceful bliss, lively joy, intense pain, or sorrow
sublimely borne.

The impulse to express poetic and pictorial concepts is
the essence of music. It addresses itself to the listener’s
creative imagination and seeks to kindle in him the feelings
and visions with which the music was composed. But this

My Work on Bach 67

it can do only if the person who uses the language of sound
possesses the mysterious faculty of rendering thoughts with
a superior clarity and precision. In this respect Bach is the
greatest of the great.

His music is poetic and descriptive because its themes
are born of poetic and pictorial ideas. Out of these themes
the composition unfolds, a finished piece of architecture in
lines of sound. What is in its essence poetic and pictorial
music appears as Gothic architecture transformed into
sound. What is greatest in this art, so full of natural life,
so wonderfully plastic, and unique in the perfection of its
form, is the spirit that emanates from it. A soul that longs
for peace out of the world’s unrest and has itself already
tasted peace allows others to share its experience in this
music.

In order to produce its full effect, the art of Bach must
be performed with lively and perfect plasticity. This prin-
ciple, which is fundamental to its interpretation, is not
always recognized.

To begin with, it is a crime against the style of Bach’s
music that we perform it with huge orchestras and enor-
mous choirs. The cantatas and the Passion music were writ-
ten for choirs of twenty-five to thirty voices and an orchestra
of about the same number. Bach’s orchestra does not ac-
company the choir: it is a partner with equal rights. There
is no such thing as an orchestral equivalent to a choir of a
hundred and fifty voices. We therefore should provide for
the performance of Bach’s music choirs of forty to fifty voices
and orchestras of fifty to sixty instrumentalists. The won-
derful interweaving of the voice parts must stand out, clear
and distinct. For alto and soprano, Bach did not use wom-
en’s voices but boys’ voices only, even for the solos. Choirs
of male voices form a homogeneous whole. At the very
least, then, women’s voices should be supplemented with
boys’, but the ideal is that even the alto and soprano solos
be sung by boys.

Since the music of Bach is architectural, the crescendos

68 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

and decrescendos, which in Beethoven’s and post-Bee-
thoven music are responses to emotional experiences, are not
appropriate. Alternations of forte and piano are significant
only insofar as they serve to emphasize leading phrases and
to leave subsidiary ones less prominent. It is only within
the limits of these alternations of forte and piano that de-
clamatory crescendos and diminuendos are admissible. If
they obliterate the difference between forte and piano, they
ruin the architecture of the composition.

Since a Bach fugue always begins and ends with a main
theme, it cannot tolerate any beginning and ending in
piano.

Bach is played altogether too fast. Music that presup-
poses a visual comprehension of lines of sound advancing
side by side becomes chaos for the listener; high speed
makes comprehension impossible.

Yet it is not so much by tempo as by phrasing — which
makes the lines of sound stand out before the listener in a
living plasticity — that appreciation for the life that animates
Bach’s music is made possible.

Down to the middle of the nineteenth century, Bach was
generally played, curiously enough, staccato, but players
since then have gone to the other extreme of rendering
him with a monotonous legato. But as time went on, it
occurred to me that Bach calls for phrasing that is full of
life. He thinks as a violinist. His notes should be connected
and at the same time separated from one another in a way
that is natural to the bowing of a violin. To play one of
Bach’s piano compositions well means to play it as it would
be performed by a string quartet.

Correct phrasing is to be attained by correct accenting.
Bach demands that the notes decisive in the musical design
are given an accent. A characteristic of each section’s struc-
ture is that as a rule they do not start with an accent but
strive to reach one. They are conceived as beginning with
an upward beat. In addition, in Bach the accents of the

My Work on Bach 69

lines of sound do not as a rule coincide with the natural
accents of the bars but advance side by side with them in
their own way. From this tension between the accents of
the line of sound and those of the bars comes the extraor-
dinary rhythmical vitality of Bach’s music.

These are the external requirements for the performance
of Bach’s music. Above and beyond those, his music de-
mands that we men and women attain the composure and
inwardness that will enable us to bring to life something of
the deep spirit lying hidden within it.

The ideas I put forward about the nature of Bach s music
and the appropriate way of rendering it found recognition
because they appeared just at the right time. The interest
aroused by the publication toward the end of the last cen-
tury of the complete edition of his works had made the
musical world aware that Bach was not synonymous with
academic and classical music. People were also in the dark
about the traditional method of performing it, and they
began to look for a method that would match Bach’s style.
But this new knowledge had as yet neither been formulated
nor grounded. And so my book aired for the first time the
views that musicians especially concerned with Bach had
been mulling over in their minds. Thus I won many a
friend.

With pleasure I think of the many delightful letters it
brought me immediately after it appeared. Felix Mottl, the
conductor, whom I had admired from a distance, wrote to
me from Leipzig, after having read the book straight
through without a break, in the train and in his hotel on
his way to that town from Munich, where some friends had
given him the book for the journey. I met him soon after,

70 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

and later on several occasions enjoyed some happy hours
with him.

It was through this book that I became acquainted with
Siegfried Ochs, the Berlin Bach conductor, and developed
a friendship that has grown continually closer.

Carmen Sylva, Queen of Romania, wrote me a long letter
because I had made her beloved Bach still dearer to her,
and it was followed by a whole series of others. The latest
of them, directed to Africa, was painfully written with a
pencil because her hand, which suffered from rheumatism,
could no longer hold a pen. I could not accept the fre-
quently repeated invitation of this regal friend to spend my
vacation at her castle in Sinaya, which carried with it the
obligation to play the organ for her two hours a day. In the
last years before my departure for Africa I could not afford
the time for a holiday. By the time I did return home she
was no longer among the living.

On Organs and
Organ Building

As a corollary to the book on Bach, I
published a study on the construction
of organs. I had written it in the fall of
1905, before beginning my medical
studies.

From my grandfather Schillinger I
had inherited an interest in organ
building, which impelled me, while
still a boy, to get to know all about the
workings of an organ.

The organs of the late nineteenth
century had a strange effect on me.
Although they were praised as mira-
cles of advanced technology, I could
find no pleasure in them. In the au-

71

72 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

tumn of 1896, after my first visit to Bayreuth, I made a
detour to Stuttgart. There I examined the new organ in the
Liederhalle of that town, about which the newspapers had
published enthusiastic reports. Herr Lang, the organist of
the Stiftskirche, an outstanding musician and personality,
was kind enough to show it to me. When I heard the harsh
tone of the much praised instrument, and when in the Bach
fugue Lang played for me I perceived a chaos of sounds in
which I could not distinguish the separate voices, my sus-
picion that the modern organ was a step not forward but
backward suddenly became a certainty.

To confirm my suspicion and to find out why this should
be so, I used my free time over the next few years getting
to know as many organs, old and new, as possible. I also
talked with all the organists and organ builders with whom
I came in contact. As a rule I met with ridicule and jeers.
The pamphlet in which I undertook to define the qualities
of the true organ was also understood at first by only a
scattered few. It appeared in 1906, ten years after my visit
to Stuttgart, and bears the title The Art of Organ-Building
and Organ-Playing in Germany and France. In it I ac-
knowledge a preference for the French style of organ build-
ing over the German, because in several respects it has
remained faithful to the traditions of the art.

If the old organs sound better than those built today, it is
often because they have been better positioned. The best
place for an organ, if the nave of the church is not too long,
is above the entrance, opposite the chancel. There it stands
high and free, and the sound can travel unhindered in every
direction.

In the case of very long naves it is better to build the

On Organs and Organ Building 73

organ at a certain height on the side wall of the nave, about
halfway along it, thereby avoiding the echo that would spoil
the clarity of the playing. There are still many European
cathedrals in which the organ hangs thus, like a “swallow’s
nest,” for example in the Cathedral at Strasbourg, pro-
jecting into the middle of the nave. Placed like this, an
organ of forty stops develops the power of one with sixty!

Today the effort to build organs as large as possible com-
bined with the object of having the organ and the choir
close together frequently places the organ in an unfavorable
position.

If there is room in the gallery above the entrance only
for a moderate-sized organ, as is often the case, the instru-
ment is placed in the chancel, an arrangement that has the
practical advantage of keeping the organ and the choir close
together. But an organ standing on the ground can never
produce the same sound effect as one placed above. From
the ground position the sound is hindered in its expansion,
especially if the church is full. How many organs, partic-
ularly in England, while good in themselves, are unable to
produce their full effect because of their position in the
chancel!

The alternative method of positioning organ and choir
close together is to devote the western gallery to the choir
and the orchestra (if there is one) and to place the organ
in some confined and vaulted space where it cannot sound
properly. Among some modem architects it is assumed that
any comer will do for the organ.

In recent times architects and organ builders have begun
to overcome the difficulty of distance, thanks to pneumatic
or electric connections between keyboard and pipes. The
different parts of the organ can now be put in different
places and still sound together. This technique has become
especially common in America, and the effects may impress
the crowd. The organ can only display its full, majestic
effects however, as a unified instrument. Then, from its

74 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

natural place above the listeners, the sounds can flood the
nave of the church.

If the church is good-sized and has a strong chorus and
orchestra, the only correct solution to the choir and organ
problem is to place both chorus and orchestra in the
church’s choir, with a small organ standing near them for
accompaniment. If that is done it is of course impossible
for the organist at the large organ to be at the same time
the conductor of the chorus.

The best organs were built between about 1850 and 1880,
when organ builders, who were artists, availed them-
selves of technological developments in order to realize
as completely as they could the ideals of Silbermann and
the other great organ builders of the eighteenth century.
The most important of them is Aristide Cavaille-Col, the
creator of the organs at St. Sulpice and Notre Dame in
Paris. The organ in St. Sulpice — completed in 1862 — I
consider to be, in spite of a few deficiencies, the finest of
all the organs I know. It functions as well today as it did
on the first day, and with proper maintenance it will do
the same two centuries hence. The organ in Notre Dame
has suffered from being exposed to the inclemencies of
weather during the war, when the stained-glass windows
were removed. Many a time have I met the venerable
Cavaille-Col — he died in 1899 — at the organ in St. Sulpice,
where he used to appear for the service every Sunday. One
of his favorite maxims was: “An organ sounds best when
there is so much space between the pipes that a man can
get round each one.”

Of the other representative organ builders of that period
I value especially Ladegast in northern Germany, Walcker
in southern Germany, and certain English and northern

On Organs and Organ Building 75

masters who, like Ladegast, were influenced by Cavaille-
Col.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century the master
organ builders became organ manufacturers, and those who
were not willing to follow this course were ruined. Since
that time people no longer ask whether an organ has a good
tone, but ask whether it is provided with every possible
modern arrangement for altering the stops, and whether it
contains the greatest possible number of stops for the lowest
possible price. With incredible blindness they tear out the
beautiful old works of their organs; instead of restoring them
with reverence and the care they deserve, they replace
them with products of the factory.

Holland is the country with the greatest appreciation for
the beauty and value of old organs. The organists of that
country were not discouraged by the difficulties of playing
the old instruments with some of their technical disadvan-
tages. As a result there are in the churches of Holland today
numerous organs, large and small, which with appropriate
restoration will in the course of time lose their technical
imperfections and keep their beauty of sound. There is
scarcely any country so rich as Holland in splendid old organ
cases as well.

Little by little the idea of reform in organ building that I
had put forward in my essay began to attract attention. At
the Congress of the International Music Society held in
Vienna in 1909, on the suggestion of Guido Adler, provision
was made for the first time for a section on organ building.
In this section some like-minded members joined me in
working out a set of “International Regulations for Organ
Building, which put an end to the blind admiration for

76 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

purely technical achievements and called for the production
once more of carefully built instruments of fine tone.

In the years that followed people perceived that the really
good organ must combine the beautiful tone of the old
organs with the technical advantages of the new. Twenty-
two years after its first appearance, my essay on organ build-
ing was reprinted without change as the generally accepted
program of reform; with an appendix on the present state
of the organ-building industry it thus became a kind of
jubilee edition.

Although the monumental organs of the eighteenth cen-
tury, as they were later perfected by Cavaille-Col and oth-
ers, are to my mind the ideal so far as tone is concerned,
lately in Germany historians of music have been trying to
return to the organ of Bach’s day. That, however, is not
the ideal organ, only its forerunner. It lacks the majestic
sonority that is part of the organ’s essential nature. Art aims
at the absolute; it does not establish the archaic as its ideal.
We may say of it, “When that which is perfect has come,
that which is incomplete shall disappear.”

Although these simple truths about how to produce an
artistically sound organ have by now been recognized, their
practical application is overdue. That is because organs are
built today in factories on a large scale. Commercial inter-
ests obstruct artistic ones. The carefully built and really
effective organ ends up being 30 percent more expensive
than the factory organ, which dominates the market. The
organ builder who wants to supply something really good,
therefore, risks his all on the venture. Very rarely indeed
can church authorities be persuaded that they are right in
paying for an instrument with thirty-three stops a sum that
could procure them one with forty.

I was talking once at Strasbourg about organs and organ

On Organs and Organ Building 77

building to a confectioner with musical tastes, and he said
to me, “So it’s just the same with organ building as with
confectionery! People today don’t know what a good organ
is, nor do they know what good confectionery is. No one
remembers how things taste that are made with fresh milk,
fresh cream, fresh butter, fresh eggs, the best oil, and the
best lard, and natural fruit juice, and are sweetened with
sugar and nothing else. They are, one and all, accustomed
nowadays to find quite satisfactory what is made with
canned milk, dehydrated egg, with the cheapest oil and
the cheapest lard, with synthetic fruit juice and any sort of
sweetening, because they are not offered anything differ-
ent. Not understanding what quality means, they are sat-
isfied so long as things look nice. If I were to attempt to
make and sell the good things I used to make, I would lose
my customers, because, like the good organ builder, I
would be about thirty percent too expensive. ...”
Through my organ recitals in almost all the countries of
Europe I realize how far we still are from the ideal instru-
ment. Yet the day must come when organists will demand
really sound, well-built instruments, and will force organ
builders to abandon the production of factory organs. But
when will the ideal triumph over circumstance?

I have sacrificed a great deal of time and labor to struggle
for the true organ. I have spent many a night over organ
designs sent to me for approval or revision. I have under-
taken many journeys to study on the spot the problems
involved in restoring or rebuilding an organ. I have written
hundreds of letters to bishops, deans, presidents of con-
sistories, mayors, ministers, church committees, church
elders, organ builders, and organists, trying to convince

78 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

them that they ought to restore their fine old organs instead
of replacing them with new ones; and I have urged them
to consider the quality, not the number, of the stops, and
to spend money to have pipes made of the best material,
and not to equip the console with superfluous alterations
in the registers. And how often did these many letters,
these many journeys, and these many conversations prove
ultimately futile, because the people concerned decided
finally for the factory organ, the specifications for which
look so fine on paper!

The hardest struggles went to preserving the old organs.
What eloquence I had to employ to obtain the rescinding
of death sentences that had already been passed on beau-
tiful old organs! How many organists received the news
with the same incredulous laughter — as did Sarah when
she received the news that she was to have descendants! —
that the organs they prized so little, because of their age
and their ruinous condition, were beautiful instruments and
must be preserved. How many organists were changed
from friends to foes because I was the obstacle to their plan
of replacing their old organ with one built in a factory! I
was also taken to task for my advice that they accept fewer
registers than they had proposed for the sake of quality.

Today I still have to look on helplessly while noble old
organs are rebuilt and enlarged until not a trace of their
original beauty is left, just because they are not powerful
enough to suit present-day taste. Occasionally I still even
see them dismantled and replaced at great cost by vulgar
products of the factory!

The first old organ I rescued — and what a task it was! —
was Silbermann’s fine instrument at St. Thomas, Stras-
bourg.

On Organs and Organ Building 79

“In Africa he saves old blacks, in Europe old organs” is
what my friends said of me.

The building of the so-called giant organs I consider
to be a modem aberration. An organ should be only as
large as the nave of the church requires and the place re-
served for it permits. A really good organ with seventy to
eighty stops, if it stands at a certain height and has open
space all round it, can fill the largest church. When asked
to name the largest and finest organ in the world, I gener-
ally answer that from what I have heard and read there
must be 127 that are the largest, and 137 that are the finest
in the world.

I was not as interested in concert organs as I was in church
organs. The best organs cannot sound with full effect in a
concert hall. Owing to the crowds that fill the halls, the
organ loses brilliance and fullness of tone. Moreover, ar-
chitects generally push the concert organ into any corner
that is convenient and where it cannot sound properly
under any circumstances. The organ demands a stone-
vaulted building in which the presence of a congregation
does not mean that the room feels choked. In a concert
hall an organ does not have the character of a solo instru-
ment that it has in a church; rather, it accompanies or
supplements choir and orchestra. Composers will certainly
use an organ with the orchestra much more in the future
than they have done in the past. Used in that way the
resulting sound draws brilliance and flexibility from the
orchestra and fullness from the organ. The technical sig-
nificance of supplementing the modern orchestra with an
organ is that the orchestra secures flutelike tones for its

80 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

bass, and thus for the first time has a bass that corresponds
in character to its higher notes.

Playing an organ with an orchestra in a concert hall gives
me great joy. But if I find myself in the position of having
to play it in such a hall as a solo instrument, I try not to
treat it as a secular concert instrument. Through my choice
of pieces and the way I play them, I try to turn the concert
hall into a church. But best of all I like in both church and
concert hall to introduce a choir and thus change the concert
into a kind of service, in which the choir responds to the
choral prelude of the organ by singing the chorale itself.

Because of the continuity of its tone, which can be main-
tained as long as desired, the organ has in it an element of
the eternal. Even in a secular room it cannot become a
secular instrument.

That I have had the joy of seeing my ideal of a church
organ very largely realized in certain modem organs I owe
to the artistic ability of the Alsatian organ builder Frederic
Haerpfer — who formed his ideas from the organs built by
Silbermann — coupled with the good sense of those church
councils that allowed themselves to be persuaded to order
not the largest but the best organ that the money at their
disposal could buy.

The work and the worry caused by my practical interest
in organ building made me wish sometimes that I had never
gotten involved in it. If I do not give it up, it is because
the fight for a good organ is to my mind part of the fight
for truth. And when on Sundays I think of this or that church
in which a noble organ is ringing out because I saved it
from being replaced by an unworthy instrument, I feel
richly rewarded for all the time and trouble I have taken
over the course of more than thirty years in the interests
of organ building.

I Resolve to Become
a Jungle Doctor

On October 13, 1905, I dropped into
a letter box on the avenue de la Grande
Armee in Paris letters to my parents
and to some of my closest friends tell-
ing them that at the beginning of the
winter term I would embark on the
study of medicine with the idea of later
going out to equatorial Africa as a doc-
tor. In one letter I submitted my res-
ignation from the post of principal of
the Collegium Wilhelmitanum (the
theological seminary of St. Thomas)
because of the time my studies would
require.

The plan I hoped to realize had been

81

82 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

in my mind for some time. Long ago in my student days I
had thought about it. It struck me as inconceivable that I
should be allowed to lead such a happy life while I saw so
many people around me struggling with sorrow and suf-
fering. Even at school I had felt stirred whenever I caught
a glimpse of the miserable home surroundings of some of
my classmates and compared them with the ideal conditions
in which we children of the parsonage at Giinsbach had
lived. At the university, enjoying the good fortune of study-
ing and even getting some results in scholarship and the
arts, I could not help but think continually of others who
were denied that good fortune by their material circum-
stances or their health.

One brilliant summer morning at Giinsbach, during the
Whitsuntide holidays — it was in 1896 — as I awoke, the
thought came to me that I must not accept this good fortune
as a matter of course, but must give something in return.

While outside the birds sang I reflected on this thought,
and before I had gotten up I came to the conclusion that
until I was thirty I could consider myself justified in de-
voting myself to scholarship and the arts, but after that I
would devote myself directly to serving humanity. I had
already tried many times to find the meaning that lay hid-
den in the saying of Jesus: “Whosoever would save his life
shall lose it, and whosoever shall lose his life for My sake
and the Gospels shall save it.” Now I had found the answer.

I could now add outward to inward happiness.

What the character of my future activities would be was
not yet clear to me. I left it to chance to guide me. Only
one thing was certain, that it must be direct human service,
however inconspicuous its sphere.

I naturally thought first of some activity in Europe. I
formed a plan for taking charge of and educating abandoned

I Resolve to Become a Jungle Doctor 83

or neglected children, then making them pledge to help
children later on in a similar situation in the same way.
When in 1903, as director of the theological seminary I
moved into my roomy and sunny official quarters on the
second floor of the College of St. Thomas, I was in a position
to begin the experiment. I offered help now in one place,
now in another, but always to no avail. The charters of the
organizations that looked after destitute and abandoned
children had made no provisions for accepting volunteers.
For example, when the Strasbourg orphanage burned
down, I offered to take in a few boys temporarily, but the
superintendent did not even let me finish my sentence. I
made similar attempts elsewhere also in vain.

For a time I thought I would someday devote myself to
tramps and discharged convicts. To prepare myself for this
I joined the Reverend Augustus Ernst at St. Thomas in an
undertaking he had begun. Between one and two in the
afternoon he remained at home ready to speak to anyone
who came to him asking for help or a night’s lodging. He
did not, however, give the applicant money, nor did he
make him wait until the information about his circum-
stances could be confirmed. Instead he would offer to look
up the applicant in his home or shelter that very afternoon
and verify the information he had been given about the
situation. After this, he would give him all necessary as-
sistance for as long as was needed. How many bicycle rides
did we make into town or the suburbs, and quite often only
to find that the applicant was unknown at the address he
had given. In many cases, however, it provided an oppor-
tunity for giving appropriate help, with knowledge of the
circumstances. I also had friends who kindly contributed
money to this cause.

As a student, I had been active in social service as a

84 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

member of the student association known as the Diaconate
of St. Thomas, which held its meetings in the St. Thomas
seminary. Each of us had a certain number of poor families
assigned to him, which he was to visit every week, taking
some aid and then reporting about their situation. The
funds we thus distributed we collected from members of
the old Strasbourg families who supported this undertaking,
begun by earlier generations and now carried on by our-
selves. Twice a year, if I remember correctly, each of us
had to make a fixed number of financial appeals. For me,
being shy and rather awkward in society, these visits were
a torture. I believe that in this preparatory experience of
soliciting funds, which I had to do much more of in later
years, I sometimes showed myself extremely unskillful.
However, I learned through them that soliciting with tact
and restraint is better appreciated than any sort of aggres-
sive approach, and also that correct soliciting methods in-
clude the friendly acceptance of refusal.

In our youthful inexperience we no doubt often failed,
in spite of our best intentions, to use the money entrusted
to us in the wisest way. The expectations of the givers were,
however, fulfilled with respect to their purpose — that
young men should devote themselves to serve the poor.
For that reason I think with deep gratitude of those who
met our efforts with so much understanding and generosity,
and hope that many students may have the privilege of
working as recruits in the struggle against poverty.

As I worried about the homeless and former convicts it
became clear to me that they could only be effectively
helped if many individuals devoted themselves to them.
At the same time, however, I realized that in many cases
individuals could only accomplish their tasks in collabora-

I Resolve to Become a Jungle Doctor 85

tion with official organizations. But what I wanted was an
absolutely personal and independent activity.

Although I was resolved to put my services at the disposal
of some organization if it should become really necessary,
I nonetheless never gave up the hope of finding an activity
to which I could devote myself as an individual and as a
wholly free agent. I have always considered it an ever re-
newed grace that I could fulfill this profound desire.

One morning in the autumn of 1904 I found on my writ-
ing table in the seminary one of the green-covered maga-
zines in which the Paris Missionary Society (La Societe
Evangelique des Missions a Paris) reported on its activities
every month. A Miss Scherdlin used to pass them on to
me. She knew that in my youth I had been impressed by
the letters from Mr. Casalis, one of the first missionaries
of this society. My father had read them to us in his mission
services.

Without paying much attention, I leafed through the
magazine that had been put on my table the night before.
As I was about to turn to my studies, I noticed an article
with the headline “Les besoins de la Mission du Congo”
(“The needs of the Congo Mission,” in the Journal des
Missions Evangeliques, June 1904). It was by Alfred Boeg-
ner, the president of the Paris Missionary Society, an Al-
satian, who complained in it that the mission did not have
enough people to carry on its work in the Gaboon, the
northern province of the Congo colony. The writer ex-
pressed the hope that his appeal would bring some of those
“on whom the Master’s eyes already rested” to a decision
to offer themselves for this urgent work. The article con-
cluded: “Men and women who can reply simply to the
Master’s call, ‘Lord, I am coming,’ those are the people

86 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

the Church needs.” I finished my article and quietly began
my work. My search was over.

I spent my thirtieth birthday a few months later like the
man in the parable who, “desiring to build a tower, first
calculates the cost of completion whether he has the means
to complete it.” The result was a resolve to realize my plan
of direct human service in equatorial Africa.

Aside from one trustworthy friend, no one knew of my
intention. When it became known through the letters I had
sent from Paris, I had hard battles to fight with my relatives
and friends. They reproached me more for not taking them
into my confidence and discussing the decision with them
than they did for the enterprise itself. With this secondary
issue they tormented me beyond measure during those
difficult weeks. That theological friends should outdo the
others in their protests struck me as all the more absurd
because they had no doubt all preached a fine sermon —
perhaps a very fine one — that quoted Paul’s declaration in
his letter to the Galatians that he “did not confer with flesh
or blood” before he knew what he would do for Jesus.

My relatives and friends reproached me for the folly of
my enterprise. They said I was a man who was burying the
talent entrusted to him and wanted to trade in false cur-
rency. I ought to leave work among Africans to those who
would not thereby abandon gifts and achievements in schol-
arship and the arts. Widor, who loved me as a son, scolded
me for acting like a general who, rifle in hand, insists on
fighting in the firing line (there was no talk about trenches
at that time). A lady who was filled with the modern spirit
proved to me that I could do much more by lecturing on

I Resolve to Become a Jungle Doctor 87

behalf of medical help for Africans than I could by the
course of action I contemplated. The aphorism from
Goethe’s Faust , “In the beginning was the Deed,” was now
out of date, she said, “Today propaganda is the mother of
events.”

In the many adversarial debates I had to endure with
people who passed for Christians, it amazed me to see them
unable to perceive that the desire to serve the love
preached by Jesus may sweep a man into a new course of
life. They read in the New Testament that it can do so, and
found it quite in order there.

I had assumed that familiarity with the sayings of Jesus
would give a much better comprehension of what to popular
logic is not rational. Several times, indeed, my appeal to
the obedience that Jesus’ command of love requires under
certain circumstances earned me an accusation of conceit.
How I suffered to see so many people assuming the right
to tear open the doors and shutters of my inner self!

In general, neither allowing them to see that I was hurt
nor letting them know the thought that had given birth to
my resolution was of any use. They thought there must be
something behind it all, and guessed at disappointment
with the slow development of my career. For this there
were no grounds at all, in that, even as a young man, I had
received as much recognition as others usually get only
after a whole life of toil and struggle. Unhappy love was
another reason alleged for my decision.

The attitude of people who did not try to explore my
feelings, but regarded me as a young man not quite right
in the head and treated me with correspondingly affection-
ate ridicule, represented a real kindness.

I felt it to be quite natural in itself that family and friends

88 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

should challenge the rationality of my plan. As one who
demands that idealists should be sober in their views, I was
aware that every venture down an untrodden path is a
venture that looks sensible and likely to be successful only
under unusual circumstances. In my own case I held the
venture to be justified, because I had considered it for a
long time and from every point of view, and I thought that
I had good health, sound nerves, energy, practical common
sense, toughness, prudence, very few wants, and every-
thing else that might be necessary for the pursuit of my
idea. I believed, further, that I had the inner fortitude to
endure any eventual failure of my plan.

As a man of independent action, I have since that time been
approached for my opinion and advice by many people who
wanted to risk a similar venture. Only in comparatively few
cases have I taken the responsibility of giving them en-
couragement. I often had to recognize that the need “to do
something special” was born of a restless spirit. Such people
wanted to dedicate themselves to larger tasks because those
that lay nearest did not satisfy them. Often, too, it was
evident that they were motivated by quite secondary con-
siderations. Only a person who finds value in any kind of
activity and who gives of himself with a full sense of service
has the right to choose an exceptional task instead of fol-
lowing a common path. Only a person who feels his pref-
erence to be a matter of course, not something out of the
ordinary, and who has no thought of heroism but only of a
duty undertaken with sober enthusiasm, is capable of be-
coming the sort of spiritual pioneer the world needs. There
are no heroes of action — only heroes of renunciation and

I Resolve to Become a Jungle Doctor 89

suffering. Of these there are plenty. But few of them are
known, and even they not to the crowd, but to the few.

Carlyle’s On Heroes and Hero-Worship is not a profound
book.

The majority of those who feel the impulse and are ac-
tually capable of devoting their lives to independent action
are compelled by circumstances to renounce that course.
As a rule they have to provide for one or more dependents,
or they have to stay with their profession in order to earn
a living. Only a person who, thanks to his own efforts or
the devotion of friends, is free from material needs can
nowadays take the risk of undertaking such a personal task.

This was not so much the case in earlier times because
anyone who gave up remunerative work could still hope to
get through life somehow or other, but anyone thinking of
doing such a thing in the difficult economic conditions of
today runs the risk of coming to grief both materially and
spiritually.

I know not only by what I have observed but also by
experience that there are worthy and capable people who
have had to renounce a course of independent action that
would have been of great value to the world because of
circumstances that made it impossible.

Those who are given the chance to embark on a life of
independent action must accept their good fortune in a
spirit of humility. They must often think of those who,
though equally willing and capable, were not in a position
to do the same. And as a rule they must temper their own
strong determination with humility. Almost always they
must search and wait until they find a path that will permit
the action they long to take. Fortunate are those who have
received more years of creative work than years of searching

90 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

and waiting. Fortunate those who succeed in giving them-
selves genuinely and completely.

These favored souls must also be humble so as not to get
irritated by the resistance they encounter, but to accept it
as inevitable. Anyone who proposes to do good must not
expect people to roll any stones out of his way, and must
calmly accept his lot even if they roll a few more into it.
Only force that in the face of obstacles becomes stronger
can win. Force that is used only to revolt wastes itself.

Of all the will toward the ideal in mankind only a small
part can manifest itself in public action. All the rest of this
force must be content with small and obscure deeds. The
sum of these, however, is a thousand times stronger than
the acts of those who receive wide public recognition. The
latter, compared to the former, are like the foam on the
waves of a deep ocean.

The hidden forces of goodness are alive in those who
serve humanity as a secondary pursuit, those who cannot
devote their full life to it. The lot of most people is to have
a job, to earn their living, and to assume for themselves a
place in society through some kind of nonfulfilling labor.
They can give little or nothing of their human qualities.
The problems arising from progressive specialization and
mechanization of labor can only be partly resolved through
the concessions society is willing to make in its economic
planning. It is always essential that the individuals them-
selves not suffer their fate passively, but expend all their
energies in affirming their own humanity through some
spiritual engagement, even if the conditions are unfavor-
able.

One can save one’s life as a human being, along with
one’s professional existence, if one seizes every oppor-

I Resolve to Become a Jungle Doctor 91

tunity, however unassuming, to act humanly toward those
who need another human being. In this way we serve both
the spiritual and the good. Nothing can keep us from this
second job of direct human service. So many opportunities
are missed because we let them pass by.

Everyone in his own environment must strive to practice
true humanity toward others. The future of the world de-
pends on it.

Great values are lost at every moment because we miss
opportunities, but the values that are turned into will and
action constitute a richness that must not be undervalued.
Our humanity is by no means as materialistic as people
claim so complacently.

Judging by what I have learned about men and women,
I am convinced that far more idealistic aspiration exists than
is ever evident. Just as the rivers we see are much less
numerous than the underground streams, so the idealism
that is visible is minor compared to what men and women
carry in their hearts, unreleased or scarcely released. Man-
kind is waiting and longing for those who can accomplish
the task of untying what is knotted and bringing the un-
derground waters to the surface.

What to my friends seemed most irrational in my plan
was that I wanted to go to Africa, not as a missionary, but
as a doctor. Already thirty years of age, I would burden
myself with long and laborious study. I never doubted for
an instant that these studies would require an immense
effort, and I anticipated the coming years with anxiety. But
the reasons that made me determined to enter into the
service I had chosen as a doctor weighed so heavily that
other considerations were as dust in the balance and
counted for nothing.

92 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

I wanted to be a doctor so that I might be able to work
without having to talk. For years I had been giving of myself
in words, and it was with joy that I had followed the calling
of theological teacher and preacher. But this new form of
activity would consist not in preaching the religion of love,
but in practicing it. Medical knowledge would make it pos-
sible for me to carry out my intention in the best and most
complete way, wherever the path of service might lead me.

Given my choice of equatorial Africa, acquiring this
knowledge was especially appropriate because in the dis-
trict to which I planned to go a doctor was, according to
the missionaries’ reports, the most urgent of all its needs.
In their reports and magazines they always regretted that
they could not provide help for the Africans who came in
great physical pain. I was greatly motivated to study med-
icine and become, one day, the doctor whom these unhappy
people needed. Whenever I was tempted to feel that the
years I should have to sacrifice were too long, I reminded
myself that Hamilcar and Hannibal had prepared for their
march on Rome by their slow and tedious conquest of Spain.

There was still one more reason why it seemed to be my
destiny to become a doctor. From what I knew of the Paris
Missionary Society, I could not but feel very doubtful that
they would accept me as a missionary.

It was in pietistic and orthodox circles that at the beginning
of the nineteenth century societies were first formed for
preaching the Gospel in the pagan world. About the same
time, liberal Christendom also began to comprehend the
need for carrying the teaching of Jesus to far-off lands. But
when it came to action, orthodox Protestantism was first.
It maintained lively and active organizations on the fringes

I Resolve to Become a Jungle Doctor 93

of the main Church, and these were able to carry out their
own independent activities. At that time the liberal Prot-
estants were strong, but preoccupied with inner govern-
mental problems in their Church. Moreover, the orthodox
bodies with their pietistic ideas of “saving souls” had a
stronger motive for mission work than did liberal Protes-
tants. For them, the Gospel signified most of all a force for
the regeneration of individual morality and for the human
condition in general.

Once the missionary societies inspired by pietism and
orthodoxy got to work they found support in liberal circles
that were friendly to missions. These believed for a long
time that they would not have to found their own missionary
societies, but that by joining those in existence, all Prot-
estants would eventually work together. They were mis-
taken, however. Indeed, the societies accepted all the
material help offered them by liberal Protestantism — how
hard my father and his liberal colleagues in Alsace had
worked for missionary societies that had a quite different
doctrinal outlook! — but they never sent out missionaries
who would not accept their own doctrinal requirements.

Because liberal Protestantism did not organize mission-
ary activities for a long time, it earned the reputation for
neither realizing its importance nor doing anything about
it. Finally it did found its own societies, but it was too late,
and the hope that there could be one mission working in
the name of the Protestant Church was lost.

I was always interested to discover that the missionaries
themselves were more liberal in their thinking than the
officials of their societies. Experience had, of course, taught
them that in foreign lands, especially among the native
people, the problem of dogmatic constraint versus liber-
alism that plagued European Christianity did not exist. The
important thing out there is to preach the essentials of the
Gospel as given in the Sermon on the Mount and to lead
people to the spiritual realm of Jesus.

94 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

My father had a special sympathy for the Paris Missionary
Society, because he thought he could detect in it a more
liberal tendency than in the others. He particularly appre-
ciated the fact that Casalis and others among its leading
missionaries wrote their reports in straightforward language
of a Christian character, rather than sugar-coated devo-
tionals.

But I learned, and very definitely, that orthodoxy played
the same role in the committee of the Paris Society that it
did in others when I offered it my services. M. Boegner,
the kindly director of the mission, was greatly moved upon
finding that someone had offered to join the Congo mission
in answer to his appeal, but at once confided to me that
serious objections would be raised by members of the com-
mittee to my theological stance and that these would have
to be removed first. My assurance that I wanted to come
“merely as a doctor” lifted a heavy weight from his mind,
but a little later he had to inform me that some members
objected even to the acceptance of a mission doctor who
subscribed only to proper Christian love, and did not, in
their opinion, adhere to the correct Christian doctrine.
However, we both resolved not to worry too much about
the matter so far in advance, and thought the objectors still
had some years during which they might arrive at a truly
Christian understanding.

No doubt the more liberal Allgemeine Evangelische Mis-
sionsverein (General Union of Evangelical Missions) in
Switzerland would have accepted me without hesitation
either as missionary or doctor. But as I felt my call to
equatorial Africa had come to me through the article in the
Paris Missionary Society magazine, I felt I ought at least
to try to join that mission’s activities in that colony. Further,

I Resolve to Become a Jungle Doctor 95

I was curious to see whether a missionary society could
justifiably arrogate the right to refuse the services of a doc-
tor to the suffering people in their district because in their
opinion he was not sufficiently orthodox.

But above and beyond all this, now that I was beginning
my medical studies, my daily work and daily worries made
such demands upon me that I had neither the time nor the
strength to concern myself with what was to happen after-
ward.

My Medical Studies,

1905-1912

When I went to Professor Fehling, at
that time dean of the department of
medicine, to register as a student, he
would have preferred to hand me over
to his colleague in the psychiatric de-
partment.

On one of the closing days of Oc-
tober 1905, I set out in a thick fog to
attend the first of a course of lectures
on anatomy.

But there was still a legal question
to resolve: I could not teach at the uni-
versity and at the same time be en-
rolled as a student. Yet if I attended
the medical courses only as an auditor.

My Medical Studies, 1905-1912 97

I could not according to government rules be allowed to
sit for examinations. The governing body met the difficulty
in a friendly spirit, and permitted me to sit for the exam-
inations on the strength of the affidavits the medical pro-
fessors would give me certifying that I had attended their
lectures. On their side, the professors resolved that, being
a colleague, I might attend all the lectures without paying
the fees.

My teachers in the five terms preceding the clinical were:
Schwalbe, Weidenreich, and Fuchs in anatomy; Hofmeis-
ter, Ewald, and Spiro in physiology; Thiele in chemistry;
Braun and Cohn in physics; Goette in zoology; Graf Solms
and Jost in botany.

Now began years of continuous struggle with fatigue. I
could not bring myself to give up either my teaching or my
preaching. Thus, at the same time as I studied medicine,
I was also delivering theological lectures and preaching
almost every Sunday. My theology lectures were especially
difficult at the beginning of my medical studies because I
had begun to deal with the problems of the teaching of
Paul.

r

The organ, too, began to absorb me now more than ever.
For Gustave Bret (the conductor of the Paris Bach Society,
which had been founded in 1905 by him, Dukas, Faure,
Widor, Guilmant, D’Indy, and myself) insisted on my un-
dertaking the organ part in all the society’s concerts. For
some years, therefore, each winter I had to make several
journeys to Paris. Although I had only to attend the final
practice and could travel back to Strasbourg during the
night following each performance, every concert took at
least three days of my time. Many a sermon for St. Nicholai
did I sketch out on the train between Paris and Strasbourg!

98 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

At Barcelona, too, I had to be at the organ for the Bach
concerts at the Orfeo Catald. And in general I now played
more frequently in concerts, not only because I had become
known as an organist in recent years but also because the
loss of my stipend as principal of the theological college
compelled me to find some other source of income.

The frequent journeys to Paris afforded me a welcome
opportunity of meeting with friends whom I had made over
the years in that city. Among those I knew best were the
sensitive and musically gifted Frau Fanny Reinach, the wife
of the well-known scholar Theodore Reinach, and Countess
Melanie de Pourtal^s, the friend of the empress Eugenie,
at whose side she figures in Winterhalter’s famous picture.
At the country house of the countess near Strasbourg, I
frequently saw her friend Princess Mettemich-Sandor, the
wife of the Austrian ambassador to Paris in Napoleon Ill’s
days. It was she whom Wagner in his day had to thank for
getting his Tannhduser produced in the grand opera house
at Paris. In the course of a conversation with Napoleon III
during a ball, she procured the promise that he would give
the order to include this opera in the list of works for
performance. Under a somewhat pert exterior she con-
cealed great intelligence and kindness of heart. I learned
from her a good deal that was interesting about Wagner’s
stay in Paris and about the people who formed Napoleon’s
entourage. It was, however, not until I was in Africa and
received her letters that the soul of this remarkable woman
revealed itself to me.

While in Paris I also saw a good deal of Mile Adele
Herrenschmidt, an Alsatian teacher.

I was attracted, at our first meeting, to Luis Millet, the
conductor of the Orfeo Catald, a first-rate artist and a man

My Medical Studies, 1905—1912 99

of thought. Through him I met the famous Catalonian ar-
chitect Gaudi, who was at that time still fully occupied with
his work on the peculiar Church of the Sagrada Familia
(Holy Family), of which only a mighty portal, crowned with
towers, had then been completed. Like architects of the
Middle Ages, Gaudi began his work aware that it would
take generations to finish. I shall never forget how in the
builder’s shed near the church, speaking as if he embodied
the spirit of his countryman Ramon Lull, he introduced me
to his mystical theory of proportions in architectural design
that represent the Divine Trinity. “This cannot be ex-
pressed,” he said, “in either French, German, or English,
so I will explain it to you in Catalonian, and you will com-
prehend it, although you do not know the language.”

As I was looking at The Flight into Egypt, carved in stone
at the entrance of the big portal, and wondering at the
donkey creeping along so wearily under its burden, he said
to me: “You know something about art, and you feel that
the donkey here is not an invention. Not one of the figures
you see here in stone is imaginary; they all stand here just
as I have seen them in reality: Joseph, Mary, the infant
Jesus, the priests in the Temple; I chose them all from
people I have met, and carved them from plaster casts that
I took at the time. With the donkey it was a difficult job.
When it became known that I was looking for an ass for
The Flight into Egypt, they brought me all the finest don-
keys in Barcelona. But I could not use them. Mary, with
the child Jesus, was not to be mounted on a fine strong
animal, but on a poor, old, and weary one, and surely one
that had something kindly in its face and understood what
it was all about. Such was the donkey I was looking for,
and I found it at last hitched to the cart of a woman who

100 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

was selling scouring sand. Its drooping head almost touched
the ground. With much trouble I persuaded its owner to
bring it to me. And then, as I copied it bit by bit in plaster
of Paris, she kept crying because she thought it would not
escape with its life. That is the donkey of The Flight into
Egypt, and it has made an impression on you because it is
not imagined, but from real life.”

During the first months of my medical course I wrote the
essay on organ building and the last chapters of The Quest
of the Historical Jesus. I resigned my post as director of
the theological seminary, where I had lived since my stu-
dent years. Leaving the big trees in the walled-in garden,
trees with which I had conversed for so many years while
I was working, was very hard. But to my great joy I found
that I should be able, after all, to stay on in the big house
belonging to the Chapter of St. Thomas. Friedrich Curtius,
first district superintendent of Colmar and then chosen, at
the request of the whole body of Alsatian clergy, to be
president of the Lutheran Church of Alsace, had taken
possession of a large official residence in the chapter’s big
house. In it he offered me four small rooms in a top-floor
apartment. Thus I was able to continue living under the
shadow of St. Thomas. On the rainy Shrove Tuesday of
1906 the students carried my belongings out through one
door of the house on the St. Thomas embankment and
brought them back in through another.

With the Curtiuses I could come and go as if I were a
member of the family, and that was most fortunate for me.
Friedrich Curtius, who as we have said was a son of the
well-known Greek scholar of Berlin, had married Countess

My Medical Studies, 1905-1912 101

Louisa von Erlach, the daughter of the governess of the
Grand Duchess Louisa von Baden, who was a sister of the
emperor Frederick. In this family, traditions of the aris-
tocracy of learning were united with those of the aristocracy
of birth. The spiritual center of the household was the aged
Countess von Erlach — born Countess de May from the area
of Neuchatel. Her health now prevented her from going
out of doors, so in order to some extent to make up for her
loss of concerts, which she felt very deeply for she was
passionately fond of music, I used to play the piano to her
for an hour every evening, and in that way I got to know
her better; otherwise she scarcely saw anybody. This dis-
tinguished noblewoman gradually acquired a great influ-
ence over me, and I owe it to her that I have smoothed
many rough edges off my personality.

On May 3, 1910, a pilot named Wincziers quite unex-
pectedly made the first flight over Strasbourg, from the
parade grounds at Strasbourg-Neudorf. I happened to be
in the countess’s room at the time, and led her — for she
could no longer move about alone — to the window. When
the airplane, which had flown quite low past the house,
had disappeared in the distance, she said to me in French,
“Combien curieuse est ma vie! J’ai discute les regies du
participe passe avec Alexander von Humboldt, et void que
je suis temoin de la conquete de l’air par les hommes!”
(How amazing is my life! I have discussed the rules of the
past participle with Alexander von Humboldt, and here I
am witnessing the conquest of the air by humans!”)

Her two unmarried daughters, Ada and Greda von Er-
lach, who lived with her, had inherited from her a talent
for painting, and while I was still director of the college I
had given over to Ada, who was a pupil of Henner, a room

102 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

with a northern exposure in my official residence to use as
a studio. At her mother’s request, I also sat for her as a
model, since it was hoped that taking up painting again
would help her recover from a severe operation, which had
brought her temporary relief from an incurable and painful
disease. She completed this picture of me on my thirtieth
birthday, without any suspicion of anything that was stirring
in my mind during that last sitting.

An uncle of the old Countess von Erlach had been for
years an officer in the Dutch colonial service without suf-
fering from fever, and he attributed this to his never having
gone out of doors in the tropics bareheaded after sunset. I
was made to promise that in her memory I would follow
the same rule. So for her sake I now renounce the pleasure
of letting the evening breeze play upon my head after a
hot day on the Equator. Keeping my promise, however,
has agreed with me. I have never had an attack of malaria,
although of course the disease does not result from going
out with an uncovered head in the tropics after sundown!

It was only from the spring of 1906 onward, when I had
finished The Quest of the Historical Jesus and had given
up the directorship of the seminary, that I could give to
my new course of study the time it required. But then I
worked with great zeal at the natural sciences. Now at last
I was able to devote myself to what had attracted me most
when I was at the Gymnasium: I was at last in a position
to acquire the knowledge I needed in order to feel on firm
ground in philosophy!

But the study of the natural sciences profited me even
beyond the increase in knowledge I had longed for. It was

My Medical Studies, 1905-1912 103

an intellectual experience. All along I had felt it to be a
danger that in the so-called humanities, with which I had
hitherto been concerned, there is no truth that affirms itself
as self-evident, but that a mere hypothesis can, by the way
in which it is presented, be recognized as truth. The search
for truth in the domain of the philosophy of history, for
example, is an interminable sequence of duels between the
sense of reality and creative power. Arguing from facts
never wins a definitive victory against skillfully presented
opinion. How often does what is perceived as progress
consist in a skillfully formulated opinion that puts real in-
sight out of action for a long time!

Having to watch this drama go on and on and having to
deal in such different ways with men who had lost all feeling
for reality had depressed me. Now I was suddenly in an-
other land. I dealt with truths that embodied realities based
on facts, and found myself among men who took it as a
matter of course that they had to provide evidence before
they made a statement. It was an experience I felt was
needed for my own intellectual development.

Intoxicated as I was with the delight of dealing with
realities that could be determined with exactitude, I was
far from any inclination to undervalue the humanities, as
others in a similar position often did. On the contrary.
Through my study of chemistry, physics, zoology, botany,
and physiology, I became aware more than ever of the
extent to which truth in thought is justified and necessary,
side by side with the truth that is established by facts. No
doubt something subjective clings to the knowledge that
results from the creative act of the mind. But at the same
time such knowledge is on a higher plane than the knowl-
edge based on facts alone.

104 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

The knowledge that results from the observation of di-
verse manifestations of being will always remain incomplete
and unsatisfying because we cannot give a definite answer
to the main question of what we are in the universe and to
what purpose we exist in it. We can find our place in the
existence that envelops us only if we experience in our in-
dividual lives the universal life that wills and rules within
it. I can understand the nature of the living being outside
of myself only through the living being within me. It is to
this reflective knowledge of the universal being and of the
relation to it of the individual human being that the hu-
manities are devoted. The conclusions at which they arrive
are determined by the sense of reality within the creative
mind. Knowledge of reality must pass through a phase of
thinking about the nature of being.

On May 13, 1908 — the rainy day on which the famous
Hohkonigsburg in Lower Alsace was ceremonially opened
after its restoration — I took the examination in anatomy,
physiology, and the natural sciences that has to be passed
in order to begin medical and clinical courses. The acqui-
sition of the necessary knowledge had cost me consider-
able effort. All my interest in the subject matter could
not help me over the fact that the memory of a man over
thirty no longer has the capacity of a twenty-year-old stu-
dent’s. Moreover, I had stupidly gotten into my head the
idea of studying pure sciences exclusively, instead of pre-
paring for the examination. It was only in the last few weeks
that I followed the recommendations of my fellow stu-
dents to become a member of a Paukverband (cramming
club), so that I could get to know what sort of questions,

My Medical Studies, 1905—1912 105

according to the records kept by the students, the pro-
fessors usually asked, together with the answers they pre-
ferred to hear.

The examination went better than I expected, even
though during those days I was going through the worst
crisis of exhaustion that I can recall during the whole of my
life.

The terms of clinical study that followed proved far less
of a strain than the earlier ones, because the various subjects
were less diverse.

My principal teachers were: Moritz, Arnold Cahn, and
Erich Meyer for medicine; Madelung and Ledderhose for
surgery; Fehling and Freund for gynecology; Wollenberg,
Rosenfeld, and Pfersdorff for psychiatry; Forster and Levy
for bacteriology; Chiari for pathological anatomy; and
Schmiedeberg for pharmacology.

I was especially interested in the lectures about drugs,
where the practical instruction was given by Arnold Cahn,
and the theoretical by Schmiedeberg, the well-known in-
vestigator into the derivatives of digitalis.

About Schmiedeberg and his friend Schwalbe, the ana-
tomist, the following delightful story circulated at the uni-
versity. Schwalbe was due to give a lecture on anthropology
to the Adult Education Society of an Alsatian town and
would of course have to mention the Darwinian theory.
When he told Schmiedeberg of his fear that he might give
offense, the latter replied: “Don’t spare them! Tell them
all about Darwinism, only take care not to use the word
‘monkey,’ and they’ll be quite satisfied both with Darwin
and with you.” Schwalbe took the advice, and had the
success that was promised.

At that time people in Alsace were beginning to demand

106 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

university extension courses to satisfy a population that was
hungering for education, and one day Windelband, the
professor of philosophy, announced to us in the common
room with joyful astonishment that a deputation of work-
ingmen had requested that he give some lectures on Hegel.
He could hardly speak warmly enough of the way people
without higher education, with their healthy feeling for
what is really valuable, had awakened to the importance of
Hegel. Later on, however, it came out that what they
wanted to hear was something about Ernst Haeckel and
the materialistic popular philosophy akin to socialism that
was expounded in his book The Riddle of the Universe,
which appeared in 1899. In their Alsatian pronunciation
the ae had sounded like e, and the k like g!

Years later I was able to render a service to Schmiede-
berg, whom I greatly admired. In the spring of 1919 I
happened to be passing the Strasbourg-Neudorf station,
from which some Germans whom the French authorities
had decided to expel were about to be transported, when
I saw the dear old man standing among them. To my ques-
tion as to whether I could help him to save his furniture,
which like the rest he had been obliged to leave behind,
he replied by showing me a parcel wrapped in newspaper,
which he had under his arm. It was his last work on digi-
talin. Since everything that these expelled people had on
them or with them was strictly examined by French officials
at the railway station, he was afraid that he might not be
allowed to take with him the bulky parcel with his manu-
script. I therefore took it from him and sent it later on,
when a safe opportunity arose, to Baden-Baden, where he
had found a refuge with friends. He died not long after his
book appeared in print.

At the beginning of my medical course I had to struggle

My Medical Studies, 1905-1912 107

with lack of money, but my position improved later on
owing to the success of the German edition of my book on
Bach and the concert fees I earned.

In October 1910, I took the state medical examination.
I had earned the fee for it the previous month at the French
Music Festival at Munich by playing the organ part of Wi-
dor’s recently completed Sinfonia Sacra, with him con-
ducting the orchestra. On December 2, after my last
examination, with Madelung, the surgeon, I strode out of
the hospital into the darkness of the winter evening, unable
to grasp the fact that the terrible strain of my medical
studies was now behind me. Again and again I had to assure
myself that I was really awake and not dreaming. Made-
lung’s voice seemed to come from some distant sphere
when he said more than once as we walked along together,
“It is only because you have such excellent health that you
have got through a job like that. ”

Now I had to complete a year of practical work as an
intern in the hospitals and to write my thesis for the doc-
torate. As my subject I chose a critical review of all that
had been published about the mental illness from which
Jesus was supposed to have suffered.

In the main I was concerned with the works of De Loos-
ten, William Hirsch, and Binet-Sangle. In my studies on
the life of Jesus I had documented that he lived in the world
of contemporary Judaic thought, which seems fantastic to
us now, with the expectation of the end of the world and
the appearance of a supernatural Messianic Kingdom. I was
immediately reproached for making Him a visionary, or
even a person under the sway of delusions. Now my task
was to decide whether, from a medical standpoint, this
peculiar Messianic consciousness of His was in any way
bound up with some psychic disturbance.

108 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

De Loosten, William Hirsch, and Binet-Sangle had as-
sumed some paranoiac mental disturbance in Jesus and had
discovered in Him morbid ideas about His own greatness
and His persecution. In order to deal with their really quite
insignificant works, it was necessary to immerse myself in
the boundless problem of paranoia. As a result a treatise
of forty-six pages took over a year to write. More than once
I was on the point of throwing it aside and choosing another
subject for my dissertation.

The result I had in mind was to demonstrate that the
only psychiatric characteristics that could be considered
historical, and about which there could be any serious dis-
pute — Jesus’ high estimation of Himself and possible hal-
lucinations at the time of His baptism — were far from
sufficient to prove the presence of any mental disease.

The expectation of the end of the world and the coming
of the Messianic Kingdom has nothing in it in the nature
of a delusion, for it belonged to a view of the world that
was widely accepted by the Jews of that time and was
contained in their religious literature. Even the idea held
by Jesus that He was the One who would be manifested as
the Messiah upon the appearance of the Messianic King-
dom contains no trace of a morbid delusion of grandeur. If
family tradition convinced Him that He was of the House
of David, He may well have thought Himself justified in
claiming for Himself one day the Messianic dignity prom-
ised to a descendant of David in the writings of the proph-
ets. If He chose to keep secret His certainty that He was
the coming Messiah and nevertheless let a glimmer of the
truth break through in His discourses, His action, viewed
solely from the outside, is not unlike that of persons with
a morbid delusion of grandeur. But in reality it is something
quite different. Concealing His claim had in His case a
natural and logical foundation. According to Jewish doctrine
the Messiah would not step forth out of His concealment

My Medical Studies, 1905—1912 109

until the Messianic Kingdom had been revealed. Jesus
therefore could not make Himself known to men as the
coming Messiah. And if, on the other hand, an announce-
ment of the coming of the Kingdom of God turns up in a
number of His sayings, made with all the authority of Him
who is to be its King, that, too, is thoroughly intelligible
from a logical point of view. Jesus never behaved like a
man lost in a world of illusions. He reacted in an absolutely
normal fashion to what was said to Him, and to the events
that concerned Him. He was never out of touch with reality.

That these medical experts succeed in casting doubt on
the medical soundness of Jesus, in the face of the simplest
psychiatric considerations, is explicable only by their not
being sufficiently familiar with the historical side of the
question. Not only do they fail to use the late Jewish view
of the world in explaining the world of ideas in which Jesus
lived, but they also fail to distinguish the historical from
the unhistorical statements that we have about Him. In-
stead of keeping to what is recorded in the two oldest
sources, Mark and Matthew, they bring together every-
thing that is said in the four Gospels collectively, and then
sit in judgment on a personality that is in reality fictitious
and consequently can be viewed as abnormal. It is signif-
icant that the chief arguments for the mental unsoundness
of Jesus are drawn from the Gospel of John.

In reality Jesus was convinced of His being the coming
Messiah because, amid the religious ideas then prevalent,
His powerful ethical personality could not have done oth-
erwise than to arrive at an awareness of itself within the
frame of this idea. By his spiritual nature He was in fact
the ethical master promised by the prophets.

Preparing for Africa

While I was still working on the dis-
sertation for my medical degree, I had
already begun making preparations for
my journey to Africa. In the spring of
1912 I gave up teaching at the univer-
sity and my post at St. Nicholai. The
lecture courses I gave in the winter of
1911-1912 dealt with attempts to rec-
oncile a religious view of the world
with the results of historical research
on world religions and with the facts
of natural science.

My last sermon to the congregation
of St. Nicholai used as its text Paul’s
blessing in his Epistle to the Philip-

110

Preparing for Africa 111

pians: “The peace of God which passeth all understanding,
shall keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus,” a text I
used to close every service I had held all through the years.

Not to preach anymore, not to lecture anymore, was a
great sacrifice. Until I left for Africa I avoided going past
either St. Nicholai or the university as much as I could,
because I found too painful the very sight of the places
where I had carried on work I could never resume. To this
day I cannot bear to look at the windows that belong to the
second classroom to the east of the entrance to the great
university building, because it was there that I most often
lectured.

Finally, with my wife — Helene Bresslau, the daughter
of the Strasbourg historian, whom I had married on June
18, 1912 — I left my home on the St. Thomas embankment
so that I might spend in my father’s parsonage at Giinsbach
as much time in the last months as my travels allowed. My
wife had already been a valuable collaborator in completing
manuscripts and correcting proofs before our marriage, and
she was again a great help with all the work dealing with
my publications that had to be completed before we started
for Africa.

I had spent the spring of 1912 in Paris studying tropical
medicine and making a start at purchasing the supplies that
would be needed for Africa. Although I acquired a theo-
retical knowledge of my subject at the beginning of my
medical studies, it was now time to work at it from a prac-
tical point of view. This, too, was a new experience. Until
then I had engaged only in intellectual labor. Now I had
to make lists of things to be ordered from catalogues, go
shopping for days on end, stand about in the shops looking
for what I wanted, check accounts and delivery notes, fill

112 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

packing cases, prepare accurate lists for customs inspec-
tions, and busy myself with other such tasks.

How much time and trouble it cost me to get together
the instruments, the drugs, the bandages, and all the other
articles needed to equip a hospital, not to mention all the
work we did together to prepare for housekeeping in the
primeval forest!

At first I regarded dealing with these things to be some-
thing of a burden. By now, however, I have reached the
point where I derive aesthetic pleasure from the careful
preparation of a list of things to be ordered. The irritation
I do feel again and again comes from the fact that so many
catalogues, including those of pharmaceutical products, are
arranged as inconsistently and inconveniently as if the firm
in question had entrusted their compilation to its doorman’s
wife.

To finance my undertaking, I began a round of soliciting
visits among my acquaintances and experienced in fall mea-
sure the difficulty of winning support for work that had not
yet justified its existence with results. Most of my friends
and acquaintances helped me over this embarrassment by
offering help for my adventurous plan on the grounds that
I was its author. But I must confess to having also had the
experience of sensing the tone of my reception change
markedly when it became apparent that I was there, not
on a social call, but to raise money. Still, the kindness I
encountered on these rounds outweighed a hundredfold
the humiliations I had to accept.

That the German professors at the University of Stras-
bourg gave so liberally to an enterprise destined for a

Preparing for Africa 113

French colony moved me deeply. A considerable portion
of the total I received came from members of my congre-
gation at St. Nicholai. I was also supported by the Alsatian
parishes, especially those whose pastors had been my fellow
students or pupils. Money for the project to be established
also flowed in from a benefit concert the Paris Bach Society
gave in its behalf with its choir, supported by Maria Philippi
and myself. A concert and a lecture in Le Havre — where
I was known through my participation in a Bach concert—
were also a great financial success.

Thus the financial problem was solved for the present. I
had money enough for all the purchases needed for the
voyage and for running the hospital for about a year. Well-
to-do friends had indicated, moreover, that they would help
me again when I had exhausted my present resources.

I was given valuable help in the management of financial
and business matters by Mrs. Annie Fischer, the widow of
a professor of surgery at the University of Strasbourg who
had died young. Subsequently she took upon herself all the
work that had to be done in Europe while I was in Africa.
Later on, her son also became a doctor in the tropics.

When I was certain I could collect sufficient funds to es-
tablish a small hospital, I made a definite offer to the Paris
Missionary Society to come at my own expense to serve its
mission field on the river Ogowe from the centrally located
station at Lambarene.

The mission station at Lambarene was established in 1876
by Dr. Nassau, an American missionary and medical man.
The missionary work in the Ogowe district had been started
by American missionaries who had come to the country in

114 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

1874. Somewhat later the Gaboon became a French pos-
session, and from 1892 onward the Paris Missionary Society
replaced the American, since the Americans were not able
to comply with the requirement of the French government
that all instruction in schools be given in French.

M. Boegner’s successor as superintendent of missions,
M. Jean Bianquis, whose piety of deeds, rather than words,
and able management of the society’s affairs won him many
friends, maintained with all the weight of his authority that
they must not lose this opportunity of obtaining, free of
cost, the mission doctor for whom they had so ardently
longed. But the strictly orthodox objected. It was resolved
to invite me to appear before the committee so they could
examine my beliefs. I could not agree to this, basing my
refusal on the fact that Jesus, when He called His disciples,
required from them nothing more than the will to follow
Him. I also sent a message to the committee that, if the
saying of Jesus, “He who is not against us is for us,” is a
command to be followed, then a missionary society errs if
it rejects even a Muslim who offers his services for the
treatment of the suffering native people. Not long before
this the society rejected a minister who wanted to come
work for them, because his theological convictions did not
allow him to answer the question, Did he regard the fourth
Gospel as the work of the Apostle John? with an unqualified
yes.

To avoid a similar fate I declined to appear before the
assembled committee and allow them to put theological
questions to me. As an alternative, I offered to visit each
member of the committee personally, so that conversation
might allow each to judge clearly whether accepting me
would really pose such a terrible threat to the souls of the

Preparing for Africa 115

Africans and to the society’s reputation. My proposal was
accepted, and it cost me several afternoons. A few of the
members gave me a chilly reception. The majority assured
me that my theological point of view made them hesitate
chiefly for two reasons: I might be tempted to confuse the
missionaries out there with my learning, and I might wish
to be active again as a preacher. My assurances that I only
wanted to be a doctor, and that on every other topic I would
be muet comme une carpe (dumb as a carp), allayed their
fears, and these visits actually helped establish quite cordial
relations with a number of the committee members.

In the end my offer was accepted on the understanding
that I would avoid everything that could cause offense to
the missionaries and to the faith of their converts. One
member of the committee did, however, send in his res-
ignation.

One more thing now remained to be done, namely, I
still had to secure permission to practice as a doctor in the
Gaboon from the Colonial Department, because I only had
a German diploma. With the help of influential acquain-
tances this last obstacle was removed. Finally the road was
clear!

In February 1913, the seventy packing cases were closed
and sent in advance to Bordeaux by freight train. While we
were packing our hand luggage, my wife began to object
to my insistence that we take with us two thousand marks
in gold instead of in notes. I replied that we must reckon
on the possibility of war, and that if war broke out gold
would retain its value in every country in the world,
whereas the fate of paper money was uncertain and bank
credits might be frozen.

I took into consideration the danger of war because I had

116 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

learned from acquaintances in Paris who had friends at the
Russian embassy that war might break out as soon as Russia
had completed the strategic railways she was building in
Poland.

I was quite convinced, indeed, that neither the French
people nor the Germans wanted war and that the parlia-
mentary leaders of both nations were eager for opportun-
ities to get together and give expression to their ideas. As
someone who had been working for years to bring about
an understanding between Germany and France, I knew
how much was being done at that very time to preserve
the peace, and I had some hope of success. On the other
hand, I never shut my eyes to the fact that the fate of Europe
did not depend upon Franco-German relations alone.

It seemed to me an ominous sign that in Germany, as in
France, gold was being withdrawn from circulation when-
ever possible and replaced by paper money. Beginning in
1911 civil servants in both countries scarcely ever received
gold when they were paid their salaries. Until that time
German officials had been allowed to choose whether their
salary would be paid in gold or in paper.

Literary Studies
During My Medical
Course

In the last two years of my medical
studies and during the time I spent as
a hospital intern, by severely limiting
my night’s rest I managed to complete
a work on the history of research on
the Apostle Paul and to revise and en-
large The Quest of the Historical Jesus
for a second edition. In addition Widor
and I worked on an edition of Bach’s
preludes and fugues for the organ, with
directions for the interpretation of
each piece.

Immediately after completing The
Quest of the Historical Jesus I began
to study the teachings of Paul. From

117

118 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

the very beginning I had been dissatisfied with explanations
in scholarly theology because they represented Paul’s
thought as complicated, contradictory, and incompatible
with his originality and greatness. From the time I realized
that the preaching of Jesus had been entirely determined
by the expectation of the imminent end of the world and
of the advent of the supernatural Kingdom of God, I began
to question this view.

Now I had to ask myself the question that previous re-
search had not: Was Paul’s thought also rooted in escha-
tology? I quickly came to the conclusion that it was. In
1906 I had already lectured on the eschatological concepts
that serve as a basis for the strange Pauline doctrine of our
being united with Christ and of death and resurrection with
Him.

In this inquiry I wanted to familiarize myself with all the
attempts that had thus far been made to find a historical
explanation for the Pauline doctrine. I hoped to show
clearly how the whole complex of questions had gradually
evolved. I proceeded in the same way with my investiga-
tion into Paul’s teachings as I had with my studies of the
Last Supper and for The Quest of the Historical Jesus.
Instead of contenting myself with simply providing a so-
lution, I took it upon myself to investigate and write the
history of the problem. That I thrice attempted to pur-
sue this laborious detour is the fault of Aristotle. How
often have I cursed the hour when I first read the section
of his Metaphysics where he explores the problem of phi-
losophy through a criticism of earlier philosophizing! These
pages awakened in me something that had been long
dormant. Since then I have experienced over and over
again that compulsion to grasp the nature of a problem not

Literary Studies During My Medical Course 119

only as it now stands but by tracing its evolution through
history.

Whether the amount of labor justifies the effort I have put
into it, I do not know. I am certain only of one thing: I
had no choice but to proceed in this Aristotelian fashion, and
it brought me intellectual satisfaction and aesthetic pleasure.

I was particularly attracted to the history of critical stud-
ies of Pauline teaching because investigation of it was a task
no one had yet undertaken, and the University of Stras-
bourg had special resources available, for it contained al-
most as many books on Paul as on the life of Jesus. In
addition, the head librarian, Dr. Schorbach, helped me
find all the books as well as journal articles on the subject.

Originally I believed that this literary-historical study
could briefly be treated as a chapter introducing an expo-
sition of the eschatological significance of Paul’s thought,
but as I worked along, it became clear that it would develop
into an entire book.

Scholarly investigation of Paul’s thought begins with Hugo
Grotius. In his Annotationes in Novum Testamentum,
which appeared around the middle of the seventeenth cen-
tury, he states the self-evident principle that in order to
understand the Epistles of Paul, we must know the proper
meaning of their words. In the past, both Catholic and
Protestant theologians interpreted Paul in accordance with
the doctrine of justification by faith.

The idea that the passages about his being in Christ and
having died and risen with Him pose important problems
had never entered the minds of the representatives of the
new historical criticism. For them it was most important
to show that Paul’s teaching was not dogmatic, but “con-
forms to reason. ”

120 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

The first achievement of Pauline research was to establish
the differences in thought that distinguish individual Epis-
tles from each other. This led to the conclusion that some
of the Epistles could not be accepted as authentic.

In 1807 Schleiermacher expressed his doubts about the
genuineness of the First Epistle to Timothy. Seven years
later Johann Gottfried Eichom proved with convincing ar-
guments that neither the Epistles to Timothy nor that to
Titus could have come from Paul’s own hand. Then Fer-
dinand Christian Baur of Tubingen University went further
still in his Paulus der Apostel Jesu Christi ( Paul the Apostle
of Jesus Christ ), which appeared in 1845. He recognized
only the two Epistles to the Corinthians and those to the
Romans and the Galatians as indisputably genuine. Except
for these, all the others appeared to him to be more or less
questionable.

Later research has modified the severity of this judg-
ment, though it is in principle correct. It has revealed that
the Epistles to the Philippians, to Philemon, and the First
Epistle to the Thessalonians are also authentic. Thus the
majority of the Epistles bearing Paul’s name can be attrib-
uted to him. Contemporary historical criticism considers
the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, that to Titus, and
the two to Timothy as definitely apocryphal. About the
Epistles to the Ephesians and the Colossians a definitive
judgment is not yet possible. They contain thoughts that
are closely allied with those of the genuine Epistles but
differ markedly from them in detail.

Baur found a criterion for distinguishing the genuine
from the nongenuine in the contrast he discovered between
the belief Paul held about Christ and that held by the
Apostles at Jerusalem. He was the first bold enough to state
that the Epistle to the Galatians is a polemical treatise
directed against the Apostles at Jerusalem. He was also the
first to recognize that the difference of opinion concerning
the authority of the Law in Christianity arises from the

Literary Studies During My Medical Course 121

varying significance given to the death of Jesus. When this
contrast became clear, Baur could conclude that the Epis-
tles in which the death of Jesus brings about a change in
this world came from Paul himself. The others were written
by disciples who wanted to attribute the later reconciliation
between the two parties to Paul’s own time.

By distinguishing between the Pauline Epistles, Baur
was the first to pose the question concerning the formation
of Christian dogma. He correctly saw that the rapid dif-
fusion of Paul’s ideas can be attributed to his belief that the
death of Christ signified the end of the Law. In the course
of one or two generations this concept became the common
property of the Christian faith, although it stood in contra-
diction to the traditional teaching represented by the Apos-
tles at Jerusalem.

By recognizing that the problem of Pauline teaching
forms the core of the problem of the origins of Christian
dogma, Baur initiated a flood of historical research into the
beginnings of Christianity. Before his time it had made no
progress because its task had not been properly formulated.

Edouard Reuss, Otto Pfleiderer, Karl Holsten, Ernest
Renan, H. J. Holtzmann, Karl von Weizsacker, Adolf von
Hamack, and others who continued the work of Baur in
the second half of the nineteenth century studied the var-
ious elements of Pauline teaching with great care. They all
agree that, in addition to the doctrine of redemption
through sacrifice, there is in Paul’s thought another doc-
trine of an entirely different character. According to this
doctrine, believers themselves experience in a mysterious
way the death and resurrection of Jesus and thereby be-
come new beings, ruled by the power of the spirit of Jesus.
The fundamental thoughts of this mystical-ethical doctrine
are expressed for the first time in Herrmann Liidemann’s
Anthropology of St. Paul, published in 1872.

To resolve the Pauline problem one must explain why
Paul claims that the Law is no longer valid for Christians,

122 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

and why along with the doctrine of redemption by faith
in the atoning death of Jesus, which he holds in common
with the Apostles in Jerusalem, Paul professes belief in a
mystical union with Christ, through whom we die and rise
again.

Historical criticism at the end of the nineteenth and the
beginning of the twentieth century thought that it could
explain Paul’s views as having advanced beyond those of
primitive Christianity because of his background. Bom and
educated in Tarsus in Asia Minor, where society was en-
tirely under the influence of Greek language and civiliza-
tion, he combined Hellenistic and Jewish thought. As a
result of this combination, he became an opponent of the
Law. He also tried to prove that redemption through the
death of Jesus is not only based on the Jewish concept of
sacrifice but can be understood as a mystical participation
in this death.

This solution to the problem seems the most obvious and
natural in view of the fact that mystical thought is unknown
to Judaism, but quite common in the Greek world. The
hypothesis that the Pauline doctrine of redemption is es-
sentially Greek has been reinforced by abundant docu-
mentation since the beginning of the twentieth century.
Hermann Usener, E. Rhode, Frangois Cumont, Hugo
Hepding, Richard Reitzenstein, and others examined
Greek literature and newly discovered inscriptions from
the first centuries a.d. that until then had been only su-
perficially examined. These new sources revealed the role
sacramental rites played in religious life at the beginning
of Greco-Oriental decadence. The hypothesis that the mys-
ticism of Paul is somehow determined by Greek religiosity
seems best explained by the fact that in Paul’s view the
believer actually participates in the death and resurrection
of Jesus through baptism and the Lord’s Supper. They were
not merely symbols as people at the end of the nineteenth

Literary Studies During My Medical Course 123

century had thought before it was realized that Paul really
thought along sacramental lines.

Since Judaism was as little familiar with sacraments as it
was with mysticism, it was thought necessary to establish
a link between Paul and Greek religiosity to account for his
view of baptism and the Last Supper. Much as this hy-
pothesis has in its favor at first glance, it is insufficient as
an explanation for the mysticism of Paul concerning our
union with Christ. As soon as the assumption is examined
in detail it becomes evident that the ideas of Paul are quite
different in character from those of the Greco-Oriental mys-
tery religions. Essentially they are not even related, though
there is a remarkable resemblance between them.

If Paul’s doctrine of mystical redemption and his sacra-
mental views cannot be explained as stemming from Hel-
lenistic ideas, the only other possible course is to view them
in the context of the late Jewish view of the end of the
world, i.e., of eschatology. This course is followed by Rich-
ard Kabisch, in The Eschatology of St. Paul in Its Connec-
tion with the Whole Idea of Paulinism (1893), and by
William Wrede, in his St. Paul (1904), which unfortunately
remained a preliminary sketch. Neither of them was able
to give a complete explication of Paul’s system of thought,
but they did provide the most convincing evidence that
within the framework of eschatology many Pauline concepts
that seemed disjointed not only were in fact simple and
viable but constituted an entirely coherent system in their
relation to one another.

These investigations, conducted outside of contemporary
criticism, did not attract attention because the theory that
Paul combined Greek and Jewish thought seemed evident
to theologians and other scholars of Hellenism in the first
centuries a.d. They failed to see the danger to which they
exposed the unfortunate Apostle by their assertion that the
essential ideas of the Epistles that bear his name appear to

124 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

be like those of the Greco-Oriental religions of the second
and third centuries a.d. ! The inevitable question also arises
as to whether these letters really belong to the fifties and
sixties of the first Christian century, or whether they orig-
inated in a later period and were only attributed to the rabbi
Paul of primitive Christianity through a literary fiction.

In the second half of the nineteenth century Bruno Bauer
and certain adherents of the so-called radical Dutch
school — A. D. Loman, Rudolph Steck, W. C. van Manen,
and others — proclaimed that the Greek ideas in the letters
bearing Paul’s name are much easier to explain if it is rec-
ognized that the writings are actually of Greek origin, rather
than assuming that a rabbi gave a new Greek character to
primitive Christian beliefs immediately after the death of
Jesus. They assert that the struggle against the Law cannot
have been undertaken by the rabbi Paul.

The demand for freedom from the Law must first have
been expressed when the Greeks became the dominant
influence in the Christian communities and rebelled against
a Christianity that had been shaped by Judaism. The strug-
gle over the Law, therefore, must have been fought, not
in the middle of the first century between Paul and the
Apostles in Jerusalem, but two or three generations later
between the two parties that had come into existence in
the intervening period. To legitimize their victory the in-
dependents supposedly attributed the Epistles to Paul and
published them under his name. This paradoxical theory
of the origin of the Pauline letters cannot, of course, be
historically proved. It does, however, reveal quite strik-
ingly the difficulties in which research finds itself when it
assumes the existence of Greek thought in Paul’s work.

To conclude the history of critical research into Paul’s
thought, I felt obliged, in 1911, to explain that the idea
that the Apostle’s mystical redemption was not Jewish but

Literary Studies During My Medical Course 125

Hellenistic could not be sustained. The only plausible ex-
planation could be found in eschatology.

When these introductory investigations appeared in print
my full exposition of the eschatological origin of Paul’s
thought was so near completion that I could have given it
to the publisher within a few weeks. But these weeks were
not at my disposal, since I had to begin to study for the
state medical examination. Later on, so much of my time
was taken up by my doctoral dissertation and the revision
of The Quest of the Historical Jesus that I had to give up
all hope of publishing the second part of my work on Paul
before my departure for Africa.

In the autumn of 1912, when I was already busy shopping
and packing for Lambarene, I undertook to integrate into
The Quest of the Historical Jesus material from the new
books that had in the meantime appeared on the subject
and to rewrite sections that no longer satisfied me. I es-
pecially wanted to explain late Jewish eschatology more
thoroughly and to discuss the works of John M. Robertson,
William Benjamin Smith, James George Frazer, Arthur
Drews, and others, who contested the historical existence
of Jesus.

It is not difficult to pretend that Jesus never lived. The
attempt to prove it, however, invariably produces the op-
posite conclusion. In the Jewish literature of the first cen-
tury the existence of Jesus is not attested to with any
certainty, and in the Greek and Latin literature of the same
period there is no evidence for it at all. Of the two passages
in his Antiquities in which the Jewish writer Josephus
makes incidental mention of Jesus, one was undoubtedly

126 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

interpolated by Christian copyists. The first pagan witness
to His existence is Tacitus, who, during the reign of Trajan
in the second decade of the second century a.d., reports
in his Annals (XV. 44) that the founder of the “Christian”
sect (which Nero accused of causing the great fire at Rome)
was executed under the government of Tiberius by the
procurator of Judea, Pontius Pilate.

Since Roman history mentions the existence of Jesus only
as the reason for the persistence of the Christian movement,
and this for the first time about eighty years after the death
of Jesus, and since some critics accept the thesis that neither
the Gospels nor the Epistles are authentic, anyone can
consider himself justified in refusing to recognize the his-
torical existence of Jesus.

But that does not settle the matter. It still has to be
explained when, where, and how Christianity originated
without either Jesus or Paul; how it later on came to trace
its origins back to these mythical personalities; and finally
for what curious reasons they, both Jewish, were designated
as the founders of Christianity.

To prove that the Gospels and Epistles are not genuine
one has to explain how they were written without being
authentic. The champions of the thesis that Jesus is not a
historical person give no account of the difficulty their view
presents; they treat the matter too casually. Though they
differ considerably from each other in details, the method
they all apply involves attempts to prove that in pre-Chris-
tian times, in Palestine or elsewhere in the East, a Christ
cult or Jesus cult of a Gnostic character already existed,
which, as in the cults of Adonis, Osiris, and Tammuz, cen-
tered on a god or demigod who dies and rises again.

Since any proof of such a pre-Christian Christ cult is

Literary Studies During My Medical Course 127

lacking, its existence must be made to appear probable by
a combination of inventions. Through further acts of in-
vention and imagination it is then shown that the adherents
of this assumed pre-Christian Christ cult at some point had
reason to change the god who dies and rises again into a
historical human personality.

As if this were not difficult enough, the Gospels and the
Pauline Epistles require an explanation as to why their
Christ cult, instead of having originated in a past age of
unverifiable events, happened to date its imaginary Jesus
scarcely two or three generations back and had him enter
history as a Jew among Jews.

Finally, their most arduous task consists in explaining
how the content of the Gospels turned from myth into
history. If they keep to their theory, Drews, Smith, and
Robertson must maintain that the events and the words
reported by Matthew and Mark are only the ideas professed
by earlier mystery religions. The fact that Arthur Drews
and others refer not only to every myth they can find but
also to astronomy and astrology in order to justify this ex-
planation shows the strain they put on our imagination.

It is clear, then, from the writings of those who dispute
the historicity of Jesus, that the hypothesis of His existence
is a thousand times easier to prove than that of His nonex-
istence. But that does not mean that this hopeless under-
taking has been abandoned. Again and again books about
the nonexistence of Jesus appear and find credulous read-
ers, although they contain nothing new beyond what Rob-
ertson, Smith, Drews, and the other supporters of this
thesis have said. The supporters of this thesis have to be
satisfied with passing off old arguments as new.

As far as these attempts aspire to serve the cause of

128 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

historical truth, they can claim that the rapid acceptance
throughout the Greek world of a doctrine that had its roots
in Judaism (as recorded in the traditional history of the
beginnings of Christianity) is difficult to explain and that
therefore the hypothesis of the derivation of Christianity
from Greek thought merits further attention.

But this hypothesis cannot be sustained. It breaks down
because nothing about the person of Jesus in the first two
Gospels could possibly be explained as originating in myth.
In addition, the eschatology of Jesus has a peculiar character
that a later period could not have attributed to a person of
its own invention; the good reason is that the generation
that preceded the destruction of the Temple by Titus did
not know enough about Jewish eschatology, and the con-
temporaries of Jesus did. What interest could this so-called
mystery cult of Christ have in attributing to this pseudo-
historical Jesus whom it invented the belief — not confirmed
by fact — in the imminent end of the world and the coming
of the Messiah, the Son of Man?

By his eschatology Jesus is so completely and firmly
rooted in the period in which the two oldest Gospels place
Him that He can only be represented as a personality that
really appeared in that period. It is significant that those
who dispute the historical existence of Jesus prudently
avoid examining his thought and action as determined by
eschatology.

A request from Widor had me occupied again with Bach
before I left for Africa. The New York publisher Mr.
G. Schirmer had asked him to prepare an edition of Bach’s
organ works with some notes on their interpretation. Widor

Literary Studies During My Medical Course 129

agreed on the condition that I would collaborate. So we
divided the task: I was to prepare the rough drafts on which
we would then work together. How many times in 1911
and 1912 did I travel to Paris to devote myself to our work!
Widor twice spent several days with me in Giinsbach that
we might concentrate on this task in undisturbed quiet.

Although as a matter of principle we both disapproved
of so-called practical editions, which prescribe rules to the
player, we nevertheless believed that for Bach’s organ
music some advice was justifiable. With few exceptions,
Bach gave no directions in his organ compositions for reg-
istration or change of manuals. It was unnecessary for the
organists of his day. The pieces were rendered as Bach had
intended as a result of the way the organs were constructed
and customarily played.

Soon after Bach’s death his organ compositions, which
he had never published, were practically forgotten for a
long time. When, thanks to the Peters edition, they were
rediscovered in the middle of the nineteenth century, mus-
ical taste and organs had both changed. The eighteenth-
century tradition was known, but its style of rendering
Bach’s organ works in that way was rejected as too simple
and too plain. It was believed that one was acting in his
spirit if one used the constant changes in volume and char-
acter of sound made possible by the contemporary organ.
As a result, toward the end of the nineteenth century mod-
em organ playing had so completely supplanted the earlier
method that it never received any attention, if indeed any-
one still knew what it had been.

France was an exception. Widor, Guilmant, and the rest
held firmly to the old German tradition, which had been
transmitted to them by the well-known organist Adolph

130 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

Friedrich Hesse (1802-1863) of Breslau. The reason was
that until about the middle of the nineteenth century, there
was in fact no art of organ playing in France, because the
organs that had been destroyed during the Revolution had
for the most part been only poorly restored. Until Cavaille-
Col and others began to build their fine instruments and
the German Peters edition enabled organists to acquire
Bach’s organ compositions, they did not know — so Widor
often told me — how to play something so completely un-
known in France. They were unfamiliar with the music and
had to learn an entirely new pedal technique. It was Lem-
mens, the well-known organist in Brussels, to whom they
went, and Cavaille-Col paid the expenses for those who
could not have afforded to go on their own. Lemmens had
been a pupil of Adolph Friedrich Hesse, the organist in
Breslau, Germany, who had studied in the tradition of Bach
with his teacher, Kittel.

At the inauguration of the newly built organ at St. Eu-
stache’s in 1844, thanks to Hesse the Parisians heard Bach’s
organ music for the first time. In the years that followed,
Hesse was often invited to France that he might be heard
at the inauguration of other organs. His playing at the Uni-
versal Exposition in London in 1854 did much to make
Bach’s music known in England.

If the French organists clung to the German tradition
transmitted by Hesse and Lemmens, it was a matter not
only of taste but of technical exigency. The organs built by
Cavaille-Col were not modem organs. They did not have
the mechanical means that made possible the variety in
registration of the German nineteenth-century organs. The
French organists were forced to play in the classical tra-
dition. This, however, was no drawback, because the won-

Literary Studies During My Medical Course 131

derful sonority of their organs allowed the Bach fugues to
achieve the full effect of the organs of Bach’s own day,
without resorting to special changes in registration.

Thus by a historical paradox the principles of the old
German tradition were preserved for the present age by
Parisian organists. This tradition also became known in de-
tail when by degrees musicians again began to consult the
theoretical works of the eighteenth century.

For anyone who looked, as I did, for every possible op-
portunity to play Bach on instruments of his own time,
these organs were the true masters of the faithful inter-
pretation of Bach’s music. They demonstrated what was
technically possible, as well as the musical effects that could
be achieved.

For the new edition we were preparing, Widor and I
thought that our task consisted in explaining to organists
who only knew modem organs and were ignorant of Bach’s
style what registration and what changes of keyboard Bach
had to use. In addition, we wanted to consider to what
extent the original style could be retained by using the
sound and the tone colors of the modem organ.

We thought tact demanded that we not insert our own
directions or suggestions in the musical score itself. We
decided instead to include our comments in short articles
as introductions to the individual pieces. The organist may
then read our suggestions but play Bach without any ci-
cerone. We did not even include fingering or phrasing.

Bach’s fingering differs from ours in that he crosses any
finger over another, following an older fashion, and there-
fore uses the thumb less frequently. In pedaling Bach could
not use the heel because the pedals of his day were short
and he had to use the toe of the foot. The shortness of the

132 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

pedals also made it difficult to pass one foot over the other.
He was therefore often obliged to let his foot glide from
one pedal to the next, whereas we can manage a better
legato than was possible for him by moving one foot over
the other, or by using toe and heel alternately.

When I was young I still found the short pedal of the
Bach period on many old village organs. Even today in
Holland many pedals are so short that it is impossible to
use the heel.

Widor and I put our remarks concerning matters of phras-
ing into the introduction because I am always irritated when
I encounter the fingering and the phrasing of some editor
or other. I insisted on the principle, which, it is to be hoped,
will someday be universally accepted, that the player must
have before his eyes the music of Bach or Mozart or Bee-
thoven as it was written by the composer himself.

A few concessions to modern taste and to modern organs
had to be made because Bach’s music, as he had conceived
it, cannot be played on our modern instruments. On the
instruments of his day the forte and the fortissimo were
relatively soft, so a piece could be played entirely in for-
tissimo, and the listener still did not tire or feel any need
of change. Similarly, Bach could impose on his hearers a
continual forte with his orchestra. On modern organs, the
fortissimo is usually so loud and so harsh that the listener
cannot endure it for more than a few moments. Further-
more, he is not able to follow the individual lines of melody,
amid all the roar, and this is essential for understanding a
Bach composition. We are therefore obliged to play some
passages with varying color and intensity that Bach would

Literary Studies During My Medical Course 133

have played entirely in forte or fortissimo if the listener is
to enjoy the music.

Nothing can be said against variations in intensity that
Bach could not achieve on the organs of his time as long
as the architecture of the piece remains clearly perceptible
and if it does not seem restless. Where Bach was satisfied
to carry a fugue through with three or four degrees of
tonality, we can allow ourselves six or eight. The supreme
rule for the execution of Bach’s organ works is that the
design must be clear; the tone color is less important.

The organist must always remind himself that the listener
can only perceive the design of the composition when the
lines of melody are perfectly distinct. That is why Widor
and I emphasize again and again that the performer must
be clear about the phrasing of the various themes and mo-
tifs of the pieces and bring out all details with the same
clarity.

One cannot be reminded too often that on the organs of
the eighteenth century it was not possible to play as rap-
idly as one might have wished. The keys were so stiff and
had to be depressed so hard that a good moderato was in
itself something of an achievement. Because Bach must
have conceived his preludes and fugues in the moderate
tempo in which they could be played on his own organs,
we too must hold fast to this fact and perform them in an
authentic and appropriate tempo.

It is well known that Hesse, in accordance with the Bach
tradition that had come down to him, used to play the or gan
compositions in a calm rhythm. If the wonderful vigor of
the Bach line of melody is properly brought out by perfect

134 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

phrasing, the listener does not perceive it as slow, even if
it does not go beyond the speed of a moderato.

Since it is impossible to accent individual notes on the
organ, the phrasing must be worked out without any sup-
port from that kind of accentuation. A plastic rendering of
Bach on the organ therefore means giving listeners the
illusion of accents through perfect phrasing. It is because
this is not yet recognized as the first requirement for all
organ playing and the playing of Bach in particular that one
so seldom hears Bach’s compositions rendered satisfactor-
ily. And how perfectly lucid must the playing be when it
has to triumph over the acoustical hazards of a large church!

For those who were acquainted solely with the modern
organ, Widor and I therefore proposed an appropriate ren-
dering of Bach’s organ compositions that would be new to
them and in contrast to the modern, showy style with which
they were familiar. We pointed out again and again how
difficult it was to play Bach on the modern organ. We
expected that the demands the works of Bach make on the
organ would do more to popularize the ideal of the real,
fine-toned organ than any number of essays on organ build-
ing and the techniques required for the performance of
Bach. We have not been disappointed.

We could only complete the first five volumes of the new
edition containing the sonatas, the concertos, the preludes,
and the fugues before my departure for Africa. We intended
to complete the three volumes containing the choral pre-
ludes during my first leave in Europe, based on drafts I
would make in Africa.

Literary Studies During My Medical Course 135

At the publisher’s request our work was published in
three languages. The differences between the French text,
on the one hand, and the German together with the En-
glish, which is based on it, on the other, reflect the differ-
ences of our conventions. Widor and I agreed that in the
French edition, his advice, which corresponded to the char-
acteristics of the French organs, should prevail, while in
the German and the English, mine should dominate as they
reflected the character of the modern organ predominant
in those countries.

Soon afterward World War I broke out and communi-
cation among publishers of different nations was inter-
rupted. For this reason the edition was published in New
York and is primarily distributed in English-speaking coun-
tries. In France and Germany the price is prohibitive.

First Activities in
Africa, 1913-1917

On the afternoon of Good Friday,
1913, my wife and I left Giinsbach; on
the evening of March 26 we embarked
at Bordeaux. At Lambarene the mis-
sionaries gave us a very hearty wel-
come.

Unfortunately, they had not been
able to erect the little buildings of cor-
rugated iron in which I was to begin
my medical practice, for they had not
secured the necessary laborers. The
trade in okoume wood, which was just
beginning to flourish in the Ogowe dis-
trict, offered any able African better-
paid work than he could find on the

First Activities in Africa, 1913-1917 137

mission station. So at first I had to use an old chicken coop
near our living quarters as my consulting room.

By late autumn I was able to move to a corrugated-iron
building twenty-six feet long and thirteen feet wide, with
a roof of palm leaves, down by the river. It contained a
small consulting room, an operating room of similar pro-
portions, and a still-smaller dispensary. Around this build-
ing a number of large bamboo huts were gradually
constructed for the African patients. The white patients
found quarters in the mission house and in the doctor s
little bungalow.

From the very first days, even before I had found time
to unpack my drugs and instruments, I was besieged by
sick people. The choice of Lambarene as the site of the
hospital was based on its geographic location and on the
information given us by Mr. Morel, the missionary, a native
of Alsace. It proved to be the right decision in every re-
spect. From a distance of one to two hundred miles, up-
stream or downstream, the sick could be brought to me in
canoes along the Ogowe and its tributaries.

The chief diseases I had to deal with were malaria, lep-
rosy, sleeping sickness, dysentery, frambesia, and phage-
denic ulcers, but I was surprised by the number of cases
of pneumonia and heart disease I discovered. There were
also many with urinary tract diseases. Surgical treatment
was called for chiefly in cases of hernia and elephantiasis
tumors. Hernia is much more common among the native
people in equatorial Africa than among white people. If
there is no doctor in the region, every year many of the
poor people are condemned to a painful death from stran-
gulated hernia, from which a timely operation could have
saved them. My first surgical case was of that nature.

138 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

Thus during the very first weeks I realized that the phys-
ical misery among the Africans was not less but much
greater than I had expected. How glad I was that in defiance
of all objections, I had carried out my plan of going there
as a doctor!

Great was the joy of Dr. Nassau, the aged founder of the
mission station at Lambarene, when I wrote to him in
America that the station once more had the services of a
physician.

An initial handicap in my work consisted in the difficulty
of finding Africans who could serve as interpreters and
helpers at the infirmary. The first who proved himself ca-
pable of assisting was a former cook by the name of Joseph
Azoawani. He stayed with me, though I could not pay him
as much as he had earned in his former job. He gave me
some valuable hints about how to deal with the Africans,
though I was unable to agree with the one he thought most
important. He advised me to reject patients whose lives,
so far as we could see, could not be saved. Again and again
he held up to me the example of the fetishistic doctors who
would have nothing to do with such cases so as to endanger
as little as possible their reputation as healers.

But on one point I later had to admit that he was right.
When dealing with Africans, one must never hold out hope
of recovery to the patient and his relatives if the case is
really hopeless. If death occurs without warning, they con-
clude that the doctor did not know that the disease would
have this outcome because he had not diagnosed it cor-
rectly. One must tell the truth to African patients without
reservation. They wish to know it, and they can bear it.
Death for them is something natural. They are not afraid
of it, but, on the contrary, face it calmly. If, against all

First Activities in Africa, 1913-1917 139

expectations, the patient recovers, the doctor’s reputation
increases immensely. He is seen as one who can cure even
fatal diseases.

My wife, who had been trained as a nurse, gave me
invaluable assistance at the hospital. She looked after the
serious cases, oversaw the laundry and the bandages,
worked in the dispensary, sterilized the surgical instru-
ments, made all the preparations for the operations herself,
and administered the anesthetics, while Joseph acted as
assistant. That she managed the complicated African house-
hold successfully and still could find some hours to spare
for the hospital every day was really an amazing achieve-
ment.

To persuade the Africans that they needed an operation
required no great skill from me. A few years earlier a govern-
ment physician. Dr. Jaur6 Guibert, had performed several
successful operations when he stayed at Lambarene on one
of his journeys, so nobody had reason to be afraid of my
modest surgical skills. Fortunately I did not lose a single
one of the first patients on whom I operated.

After a few months the hospital had to accommodate
about forty patients every day. I had, however, to provide
shelter not only for these but for their companions, who
had brought them long distances in canoes and who stayed
to paddle them back home again.

Heavy as it was, I found the actual work a fighter burden
than the care and responsibility that came with it. Unfor-
tunately I am among those doctors who do not have the
robust temperament desirable for this calling, but who
worry about the condition of the seriously ill and of those
who have undergone an operation. In vain have I tried to
achieve that equanimity that permits the doctor to combine

140 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

compassion for his patients with the necessary preservation
of his own energies.

Insofar as the rule could be enforced, I used to exact
from my African patients some tangible evidence of their
appreciation for the help they had received. Again and again
I used to remind them that they enjoyed the blessing of
the hospital because so many people in Europe had made
sacrifices to provide it; it was, therefore, now their duty to
give all the help they could to keep it going. Thus I grad-
ually developed the practice whereby, in return for the
medicines given, I would receive gifts of money, bananas,
poultry, or eggs. These did not, of course, approach the
value of the medicines, but it was a modest contribution
to the upkeep of the hospital. With the bananas I could
feed the sick whose provisions had given out, and with the
money I could buy rice if the supply of bananas failed. I
also thought that the Africans would appreciate the value
of the hospital more if they themselves contributed to its
maintenance, according to their ability, than if they simply
got everything for nothing.

Experience has confirmed the educational value of some
form of payment. Of course no gift was exacted from the
very poor and the old — and among the Africans age always
means poverty. The most primitive among them, however,
had a different conception of this present. When they left
the hospital cured, they demanded a gift from me because
I had now become their friend.

In my exchanges with these primitive people I naturally
asked myself the much debated question of whether they
were mere prisoners of tradition, or whether they were

First Activities in Africa, 1913-1917 141

capable of independent thought. In the conversations I
had with them I found to my surprise that they were far
more interested in the elemental questions about the
meaning of life and the nature of good and evil than I had
supposed.

As I had expected, the questions of dogma to which the
Missionary Society’s committee in Paris had attached so
much importance played practically no part in the sermons
of the missionaries. If they wanted to be understood by
their listeners they could do nothing beyond preaching the
simple Gospel of becoming freed from the world by the
spirit of Jesus, the Gospel that comes to us in the Sermon
on the Mount and the finest sayings of Paul.

Necessity compelled them to present Christianity pri-
marily as an ethical religion. When they met twice a year
for conferences at different mission stations, they focused
on the practical application of the Gospels, and not on
problems of dogma. That some were more strict about mat-
ters of doctrine than others did not influence their mis-
sionary work, which they shared. As I did not make the
smallest attempt to disturb them with my theological views,
they soon laid aside all mistrust and rejoiced, as I did, that
we were united in the piety of obedience to Jesus and in
the will to simple Christian activity. Not many months after
my arrival, they asked me to preach, and thus I was released
from the promise I had given in Paris d’etre muet comme
une carpe.

I was also invited to attend as an observer the meetings
of the Synod when the missionaries and the African preach-
ers sat in council together. One day, when I had expressed
my opinion on a certain point at the request of the mis-
sionaries, one of the African preachers suggested that the

142 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

matter was outside the Doctor’s province “because he is
not a theologian.”

I was also allowed to participate in the examination of
the candidates for baptism. I generally got them to send
me one or two old women so that I could make the trying
half hour as easy as possible for them. On one such occa-
sion, when I put to one worthy matron the question of
whether the Lord Jesus had been rich or poor, she replied:
“What a stupid question! If God, the Great Chief, was His
Father, He certainly can’t have been poor.” And in general
she answered with the Canaanite woman’s quickness of
repartee. It was, however, of no help to her that the pro-
fessor of theology gave her a good grade. The African
preacher to whose district she belonged dealt with her more
strictly so as to punish her for not having attended the
catechism classes regularly. Her excellent answers found
no favor in his eyes; he wanted to hear those that were in
the catechism. So she failed and had to take the examination
again six months later.

I found preaching a great joy. To be allowed to preach
the sayings of Jesus and Paul to people for whom they were
quite new was a wonderful experience. As interpreters I
had the African teachers of the mission school, who trans-
lated each sentence at once into the language of the Galoas
or of the Pahouins, or sometimes into both in succession.

The little spare time that was at my disposal in the first
year at Lambarene I devoted to work on the last three
volumes of the American edition of Bach’s organ music.

For keeping up my organ playing I had the magnificent
piano with pedal attachment, built specially for the tropics,
which the Paris Bach Society had presented to me in rec-
ognition of my many years of service as their organist.

First Activities in Africa, 1913—1917 143

At first, however, I lacked the courage to practice. I had
tried to get used to the thought that my work in Africa
would mean the end of my life as an artist and that re-
nunciation of it would be easier if I allowed fingers and feet
to grow rusty. One evening, however, as, in a melancholy
mood, I was playing one of Bach’s organ fugues, it suddenly
occurred to me that I might after all use my free hours in
Africa to improve my technique and interpretation. I im-
mediately decided to select compositions of Bach, Men-
delssohn, Widor, Cesar Franck, and Max Reger, and to
study them carefully down to the smallest detail, learning
them by heart, even if a single piece took weeks or months.

How I enjoyed being able to practice in my spare time,
quietly and without being harassed by concert schedules,
even though sometimes I could find only a half hour in the
day.

My wife and I had now completed our second dry season
in Africa and were making plans for a trip home at the
beginning of the third when, on August 5, 1914, the news
came that war had broken out in Europe.

On the evening of that very day we were informed that
we must consider ourselves prisoners of war; we might
remain in our own house for the present, but we must cease
all contact with either white people or Africans and obey
unconditionally the orders of the African soldiers who were
assigned to be our guards. One of the missionaries and his
wife, who like ourselves were Alsatians, were also interned
at the Lambarene mission station.

At first the Africans experienced only one aspect of the
war: the timber trade was interrupted, and all commodities

144 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

had become more expensive. Only later, when many of
them were transported to Cameroon to serve as carriers
for the active forces, did they understand what the war
really meant.

When it became known that, of the white men who used
to live on the Ogowe, ten had already been killed, an old
African remarked: “What, so many men killed already in
this war! Why don’t their tribes talk it out in a palaver?
How can they ever pay for all these dead men?” For in
African warfare those who die, whether among the con-
querors or the conquered, have to be paid for by the op-
posite side. This same man observed that Europeans kill
each other merely out of cruelty, and not out of necessity,
because they don’t eat the dead.

That white people were making prisoners of other whites
and putting them under the authority of black soldiers was
something incomprehensible to the Africans. What a tor-
rent of abuse my African guards came in for from the people
of the neighboring villages because they thought the guards
were “the Doctor’s masters.”

When I was forbidden to work in the hospital, I thought
at first that I would proceed with the completion of my
book on Paul. But at once another subject forced itself upon
me, one about which I had thought for many years and
which became a timely issue because of the war: the prob-
lem of our civilization. So on the second day of my intern-
ment, still quite amazed at being able to sit down at my
writing table early in the morning as in the days before I
took up medicine, I set to work on The Philosophy of Civ-
ilization.

The idea of pursuing this subject had first come to me
in the summer of 1899 at the house of Ernst Curtius in

First Activities in Africa, 1913-1917 145

Berlin. Hermann Grimm and others were conversing there
one evening about a session of the academy from which
they had just come when suddenly one of them — I forget
who it was — exclaimed, “So we are all nothing but epi-
gones!” This pronouncement struck me like a bolt of light-
ning, because it put into words what I myself felt.

Since my first years at the university I had grown to
doubt increasingly the idea that mankind is steadily moving
toward improvement. My impression was that the fire of
its ideals was burning out without anyone noticing or wor-
rying about it. On a number of occasions I had seen public
opinion failing to reject officially proclaimed theses that
were barbaric; on the contrary, it approved inhumane con-
duct whether by governments or individuals. What was
just and equitable seemed to be pursued with only luke-
warm zeal. I noticed a number of symptoms of intellectual
and spiritual fatigue in this generation that is so proud of
its achievements. It seemed as if I were hearing its mem-
bers trying to convince one another that their previous
hopes for the future of mankind had been placed too high,
and that it was becoming necessary to limit oneself to striv-
ing for what was attainable. The slogan of the day, Real-
politik,” meant approval of a shortsighted nationalism and
a pact with the forces and tendencies that had hitherto been
resisted as enemies of progress. One of the most visible
signs of decline seemed to be the return of superstition,
long banished from the educated circles of society.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, when people
began to review their past achievements in order to mea-
sure the progress that had been made, they displayed an
optimism that I found incomprehensible. It was assumed
everywhere not only that we had made progress in inven-

146 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

tions and knowledge but that in the intellectual and ethical
spheres we lived and moved at a height that had never
before been attained and should never be lost. My own
impression was that in our intellectual and spiritual life not
only had we sunk below the level of past generations, but
we were in many respects merely living on their achieve-
ments, and that not a little of this heritage was beginning
to melt away in our hands.

And now, here was someone expressing the criticism that
I myself had silently and half unconsciously leveled against
our age! After that evening at Professor Curtius s house,
along with my other work I always considered writing a
book with the title “Wir Epigonen” (We Inheritors of a
Past).

When I discussed these thoughts with my friends, they
usually took them to be interesting paradoxes and mani-
festations of a fin-de-si^cle pessimism. After that, I kept
my ideas strictly to myself. Only in my sermons did I ex-
press my doubts concerning our culture and spirituality.

Now war had broken out as a result of the collapse of
our civilization. “We Inheritors of a Past,” then, had lost
its meaning. The book had been conceived as a criticism
of civilization. It was meant to demonstrate its decadence
and to draw attention to its inherent dangers. But since the
catastrophe had already come about, what good could come
of deliberating about the causes?

I thought of writing for my own sake this book, which
had thus become out of date. But could I be certain that
the manuscript would not be taken from a prisoner of war?
Was there any prospect of my returning to Europe again?
In this spirit of complete detachment I set to work and went
on with it even after I was allowed to go about and devote
myself to the sick again.

First Activities in Africa, 1913—1917 147

At the end of November, thanks to Widor’s intervention,
as I learned afterward, we were released from our intern-
ment. Even before that the order that kept me away from
the sick had proved impossible to enforce. White and black
alike had protested against being deprived of the services
of the only doctor for hundreds of miles around for no
apparent reason. The district commandant therefore felt
obliged to give now to one, now to another, a note for my
guards, telling them to let the bearer pass because he
needed my help.

After I resumed my medical activities in relative free-
dom, I still found time to work on the book on civilization.
Many a night I sat thinking and writing, overcome with
emotion as I thought of those who at that very hour were
lying in the trenches.

At the beginning of the summer of 1915 1 awoke from some
kind of mental daze. Why only criticize civilization? Why
limit myself to analyzing ourselves as epigones? Why not
work on something constructive?

I then began to search for the knowledge and convictions
that comprise the will to civilization and the power to realize
it. “We Inheritors of a Past” expanded into a work dealing
with the restoration of civilization.

As I worked along, the connection between civilization
and our concept of the world became clear to me. I rec-
ognized that the catastrophe of civilization stemmed from
a catastrophe in our thinking.

The ideals of true civilization had lost their power be-
cause the idealistic attitude toward life in which they are
rooted had gradually been lost. All the events that occur
within nations and within mankind can be traced to spiritual

148 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

causes stemming from the prevailing attitude toward life.

But what is civilization?

The essential element in civilization is the ethical per-
fecting of the individual as well as society. At the same
time, every spiritual and every material step forward has
significance for civilization. The will to civilization is, then,
the univeri U will to progress that is conscious of the ethical
as the highest value. In spite of the great importance we
attach to the achievements of science and human prowess,
it is obvious that only a humanity that is striving for ethical
ends can benefit in full measure from material progress and
can overcome the dangers that accompany it. The present
situation was terrible proof of the misjudgment of the gen-
eration that had adopted a belief in an immanent power of
progress realizing itself, naturally and automatically, and
which thought that it no longer needed any ethical ideals
but could advance toward its goals by means of knowledge
and work alone.

The only possible way out of chaos is for us to adopt a
concept of the world based on the ideals of true civilization.

But what is the nature of that concept of the world in
which the will to general progress and the will to ethical
progress join and are linked together?

It consists in an ethical affirmation of the world and of
life.

What is affirmation of the world and of life?

To us Europeans and to people of European descent
everywhere, the will to progress is something so natural
and so much a matter of course that it never occurs to us
that it is rooted in a concept of life and springs from an act
of the spirit. But if we look around us, we soon notice that
what we take for granted is not at all natural everywhere.

First Activities in Africa, 1913—1917 149

gg

Him

In Indian thought all efforts to acquire knowledge and
power and to improve the living conditions of man and
society as a whole are considered mere folly. It teaches that
the only wise attitude for a person is to withdraw entirely
into himself and to concern himself with the perfecting of
his inner life. What may become of human society and of
mankind does not concern the individual. The meditation
on the inner life in Indian thought consists of man’s sub-
mission to the idea of giving up his will to live; it reduces
his earthly existence to abstinence from all action and to
negation of life in order to achieve a state of nonbeing.

It is interesting to trace the origin of this unnatural idea
of negation of the world. At first it had nothing whatever
to do with any concept of the world, but was a magical idea
of the Brahmin priests of early times. They believed that
by detachment from the world and from life they could
become supernatural beings and obtain magical powers.
The experience of ecstasy has contributed to the growth of
this idea.

In the course of time this rejection of the world and of
life, which was originally the privilege of the Brahmin, was
developed into a system of thought that claimed to be valid
for all men.

Whether the will to progress is present or not depends,
then, on the prevailing concept of the world and of life. A
concept that negates this world excludes progress, while
affirmation demands it. Among primitive and semiprimitive
peoples, who have not yet faced the problem of acceptance

150 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

or rejection of the world, there is also no will to progress.
Their ideal is the simplest life with the least possible trou-
ble.

We Europeans have only arrived at our will to progress
in the course of time and through a change in our concep-
tion of the world. In antiquity and in the Middle Ages we
can find the first attempts. Greek thinking does try to es-
tablish an affirmative attitude toward the world and toward
life, but it fails in the attempt and ends in resignation. The
attitude of the Middle Ages is determined by the ideas of
primitive Christianity brought into harmony with Greek
metaphysics. It is fundamentally a rejection of the world
and of life because Christianity focused on the world be-
yond, rather than on life on this earth. What manifests itself
as affirmation of the world in the Middle Ages is inspired
by the active ethic contained in the preaching of Jesus, and
it is made possible through the creative forces of fresh and
unspoiled peoples on whom Christianity had imposed a
concept of the world that was in contradiction to their na-
ture.

Gradually, the affirmation of life, already latent among
the European peoples as a result of the Great Migration,
begins to manifest itself. The Renaissance proclaims its free-
dom from the medieval negation of the world and of life.
An ethical character is given to this new world-accepting
attitude by incorporating the ethic of love taught by Jesus.
This, as an ethic of action, is strong enough to reject the
negative concept of the world from which it had issued,
and to arrive at the new affirmative attitude toward the
world and life. In this way it attained the ideal realization
of a spiritual and ethical world within the natural.

The striving for material and spiritual progress that char-

First Activities in Africa, 1913—1917 151

acterizes the people of modern Europe, therefore, has its
source in the worldview at which these people had arrived.

As heir to the Renaissance and the spiritual and religious
movements connected with it, man gains a new perspective
of himself and of the world. A need awakens to create
spiritual and material values that would bring about change
in individuals and in mankind. The modern European is
not only enthusiastic about progress to his personal advan-
tage. He is less concerned about his own fate than about
the happiness of future generations. Enthusiasm for prog-
ress has taken possession of him. Impressed by his discov-
ery that the world is created and sustained by forces
according to a definite design, he wills himself to become
the active, purposeful force in the world. He looks with
confidence toward the new and better times that will dawn
for mankind. He learns by experience that ideas held and
acted upon by the masses can gain power over circum-
stances and transform them.

It is upon this will to material progress, acting in con-
junction with the will to ethical progress, that modern civ-
ilization is founded.

There is an essential relationship between the modern
European attitude of ethical affirmation toward the world
and life and that of Zarathustra and of Chinese thought, as
we encounter it in the writings of Cong-tse, Meng-tse, Mi-
tse, and the other great ethical thinkers of China.

In each of these we can see the striving to remold the
circumstances of peoples and of makind to achieve progress,
even if the efforts are not as strong as those of modern
Europe. In areas under the religious influences of Zara-
thustra and the Chinese, a life-affirming civilization actually
emerged. But they both met with a tragic end. The neo-

152 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

Persian civilization based on the philosophy of Zarathustra
was destroyed by Islam. The Chinese civilization is ham-
pered in its natural development and threatened with decay
by the pressure exerted upon it by European ideas and
problems and by confusion caused by the country’s political
and economic disorder.

In modern European thought the tragedy is that the
original bonds uniting the affirmative attitude toward the
world with ethics are, by a slow but irresistible process,
loosening and finally breaking apart. They will end in dis-
integration. European humanity is being guided by a will
to progress that has become merely external and has lost
its bearings.

By itself the affirmation of life can only produce a partial
and imperfect civilization. Only if it turns inward and be-
comes ethical can the will to progress attain the ability to
distinguish the valuable from the worthless. We must
therefore strive for a civilization that is not based on the
accretion of science and power alone, but which cares most
of all for the spiritual and ethical development of the in-
dividual and of humankind.

How could it come about that the modern concept of the
world and of life changed its original ethical character to a
nonethical one?

The only possible explanation is that the ethical was not
really founded on thought. The thought out of which it
arose was noble and enthusiastic but not deep. The intimate
connection between the ethical and the affirmative attitude
toward life was a matter of intuition and experience, but
was not based on proof. It proclaimed the affirmation of
life and ethical principles without having penetrated to
their essence and their inner connection.

First Activities in Africa, 1913-1917 153

This noble and valuable concept of the world was based
on belief in, rather than consistent thought about, the real
nature of things; thus it was destined to fade with time and
to lose its power over man’s mind.

All subsequent thinking about the problems of ethics and
man’s relation to his world could not but expose the weak
points of this view. Thus, in spite of the original intention
to defend this concept, it hastened its demise. It never
succeeded in replacing an inadequate with an adequate
foundation. Again and again attempts to build new foun-
dations proved too weak to support the superstructure.

With my apparently abstract yet absolutely practical
thinking about the connection of civilization with philoso-
phy, I had come to see the decay of civilization as a con-
sequence of the continuous weakening of the ethical
affirmation of life within modem worldviews. It had become
clear to me that, like so many other people, I had clung to
that concept of decay from inner necessity, without asking
myself to what extent it could be supported by thought.

I had got thus far during the summer of 1915. What was
to come next? Could the difficulty be solved that until now
had seemed insoluble? Was it imaginable that the world-
view that alone had made civilization possible was an il-
lusion destined to stir our minds but always remain hidden?
To continue to hold this illusion up to our generation
seemed to me absurd and degrading. Only if it offers itself
to us as something arising from thought can it become our
own spiritually.

Fundamentally I remained convinced that ethics and the
affirmation of life are interdependent and the precondition

154 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

for all true civilization. A first step out of this impasse
seemed imperative: to attain, through new, sincere, and
direct contemplation, that truth we have hoped for in the
past and which sometimes even seemed to be real.

In undertaking this I felt like someone who has to replace
a rotten boat that is no longer seaworthy with a new and
better one, but does not know how to proceed.

For months on end I lived in a continual state of mental
agitation. Without the least success I concentrated — even
during my daily work at the hospital — on the real nature
of the affirmation of life and of ethics and on the question
of what they have in common. I was wandering about in a
thicket where no path was to be found. I was pushing
against an iron door that would not yield.

All that I had learned from philosophy about ethics left
me dangling in midair. The notions of the Good that it had
offered were all so lifeless, so unelemental, so narrow, and
so lacking in content that it was impossible to relate them
to an affirmative attitude.

Moreover, philosophy never, or only rarely, concerned
itself with the problem of the connection between civili-
zation and concepts of the worldview. The affirmation of
life in modem times seemed so natural that no need was
felt to explore its meaning.

To my surprise I recognized that the central province of
philosophy into which my reflections on civilization and the
worldview had led me was virtually unexplored territory.
Now from this point, now from that, I tried to penetrate
to its interior, but again and again I had to give up the
attempt. I saw before me the concept that I wanted, but I
could not catch hold of it. I could not formulate it.

While in this mental state I had to take a long journey
on the river. I was staying with my wife on the coast at

First Activities in Africa, 1913—1917 155

Cape Lopez for the sake of her health— it was in September
1915 — when I was called out to visit Madame Pelot, the
ailin g wife of a missionary, at N’Gomo, about 160 miles
upstream. The only transportation I could find was a small
steamer, which was about to leave, towing two overloaded
barges. In addition to myself, only Africans were on board,
among them my friend Emil Ogouma from Lambarend.
Since I had been in too much of a hurry to arrange for
enough provisions for the journey, they invited me to share
their food.

Slowly we crept upstream, laboriously navigating — it was
the dry season — between the sandbanks. Lost in thought
I sat on the deck of the barge, struggling to find the ele-
mentary and universal concept of the ethical that I had not
discovered in any philosophy. I covered sheet after sheet
with disconnected sentences merely to concentrate on the
problem. Two days passed. Late on the third day, at the
very moment when, at sunset, we were making our way
through a herd of hippopotamuses, there flashed upon my
mind, unforeseen and unsought, the phrase “reverence for
life.” The iron door had yielded. The path in the thicket
had become visible. Now I had found my way to the prin-
ciple in which affirmation of the world and ethics are joined
together!

I was at the root of the problem. I knew that the ethical
acceptance of the world and of life, together with the ideals
of civilization contained in this concept, has its foundation
in thought.

What is Reverence for Life, and how does it develop in us?

If man wishes to have a clear idea about himself and his
relation to the world, he must turn away from the various

156 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

concepts created by his reason and knowledge and reflect
upon his own consciousness, the elemental, the most im-
mediate reality. Only if he starts from this given fact can
he arrive at a thoughtful concept.

Descartes begins with the sentence “I think, therefore I
am” ( Cogito , ergo sum). With his beginning thus chosen,
he pursues the road to the abstract. Out of this act of think-
ing, which is without substance and artificial, nothing con-
cerning the relation of man to himself and to the universe
can come. In reality, however, the most immediate act of
consciousness has some content. To think means to think
something. The most immediate fact of man’s consciousness
is the assertion “I am life that wills to live in the midst of
life that wills to live,” and it is as will to live in the midst
of will to live that man conceives himself at every moment
that he spends meditating on himself and the world around
him.

As my will to live includes an ardent desire to perpetuate
life and the mysterious exaltation of the will to live, which
we call happiness, and while there is fear of destruction
and of the mysterious damage of the will to live, which we
call pain, so too is this will to live in those around me,
whether it expresses itself to me or remains mute.

Man must now decide how he will live in the face of his
will to live. He can deny it. But if he wants to change his
will to live into the will not to live, as is the case in Indian
and indeed in all pessimistic thought, he creates a contra-
diction with himself. He builds his philosophy of life on a
false premise, something that cannot be realized.

Indian thought, like that of Schopenhauer, is full of con-
tradictions because it cannot help but make concessions
over and over again to the will to live, which persists in

First Activities in Africa, 1913—1917 157

spite of all negation of the world, though it will not admit
that these are concessions. Negation of the will to live is
only consistent with itself if it decides to put an end to
physical existence.

If man affirms his will to live, he acts naturally and sin-
cerely. He confirms an act, which has already been accom-
plished unconsciously, by bringing it to his conscious
thought.

The beginning of thought, a beginning that continually
repeats itself, is that man does not simply accept his exis-
tence as something given, but experiences it as something
unfathomably mysterious.

Affirmation of life is the spiritual act by which man ceases
to live thoughtlessly and begins to devote himself to his
life with reverence in order to give it true value. To affirm
life is to deepen, to make more inward, and to exalt the
will to live.

At the same time the man who has become a thinking
being feels a compulsion to give to every will to live the
same reverence for life that he gives to his own. He ex-
periences that other life in his own. He accepts as good
preserving life, promoting life, developing all life that is
capable of development to its highest possible value. He
considers as evil destroying life, injuring life, repressing
life that is capable of development. This is the absolute,
fundamental principle of ethics, and it is a fundamental
postulate of thought.

Until now the great weakness in all ethical systems has
been that they dealt only with the relations of man to man.
In reality, however, the question is, What is our attitude
toward the universe and all that it supports? A man is ethical
only when life as such is sac r e d to him — the life of plants

158 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

and animals as well as that of his fellow men — and when
he devotes himself to helping all life that is in need of help.

Only the universal ethic of growing responsibility for all
that lives — only that ethic can be founded solidly in
thought. The ethic of the relation of man to man is nothing
but a fragment of the universal ethic.

The ethic of Reverence for Life, therefore, comprehends
within itself everything that can be described as love, de-
votion, and compassion in suffering, the sharing of joy and
common endeavors.

The world, however, offers us the horrible drama of will
to live divided against itself. One existence holds its own
at the cost of another; one destroys another. Only in the
thinking man has the will to live become conscious of other
wills to live and desirous of solidarity with them. This sol-
idarity, however, he cannot completely bring about, be-
cause man is subject to the puzzling and horrible law of
being obliged to live at the cost of other life and to incur
again and again the guilt of destroying and injuring life.
But as an ethical being he strives to escape whenever pos-
sible from this necessity, and as one who has become know-
ing and merciful, he tries to end this division of the will to
live insofar as it is in his power. He aspires to prove his
humanity and to release others from their sufferings.

Reverence for Life arising from the will to live that is
inspired by thought contains the affirmation of life and eth-
ics inseparably combined. It seeks to create values and to
make progress of various kinds that will serve the material,
spiritual, and ethical development of the individual and of
mankind.

While the unthinking modern affirmation of life vacillates
between its ideals of science and those of power, a reflective
affirmation of life proposes the spiritual and ethical per-

First Activities in Africa, 1913-1917 159

fecting of mankind as the highest ideal, an ideal from which
alone all other ideals of progress receive their real value.

Through ethical affirmation of the world and of life, we
reach a deeper comprehension of life that enables us to
distinguish between what is essential in civilization and
what is not. The absurd pretension of considering ourselves
civilized loses its power over us. We confront the truth
that, with so much progress in knowledge and power, it
has become not easier but more difficult to attain true civ-
ilization.

The problem of the mutual relationship between the spir-
itual and the material dawns on us. We know that we all
have to struggle with circumstances to preserve our own
humanity. We must do all we can so that the desperate
struggle that many fight in order to preserve their humanity
amid unfavorable social circumstances will become a battle
that has a chance of success.

A deepened ethical will to progress that springs from
thought will lead us back, then, out of our poor civilization
with its many faults to true civilization. Sooner or later the
true and final renaissance must dawn, which will bring
peace to the world.

By then a plan for my whole Philosophy of Civilization stood
our clearly in my mind. It fell quite naturally into four
parts: (1) the present lack of civilization and its causes;
(2) a discussion of the idea of Reverence for Life in relation
to the attempts made in the past by European philosophy
to provide a foundation for an affirmative ethical attitude
toward the world; (3) an exposition of the concept of Rev-
erence for Life; (4) the civilized state.

The writing of the second part, the description of Eu-

160 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

ropean philosophy’s tragic struggle to arrive at an ethical
basis for acceptance of the world, was forced upon me. I
felt an inner need to explore the historical development of
the problem and to offer my solution as a synthesis of all
previous solutions. I have never regretted having suc-
cumbed to this temptation. In my attempt to understand
the thought of others my own became clearer.

I had brought some of the philosophical works needed
for this historical research with me to Africa. The others I
needed were sent to me by Mr. Strohl, professor of zoology
at Zurich, and his wife. The well-known Bach singer, Rob-
ert Kaufmann of Zurich, whom I had so often accompanied
on the organ, also helped to keep me in touch with the
outside world, with the assistance of the Office des Internes
Civils at Geneva.

Without haste I sketched rough drafts of the material I
had collected and sifted, without regard to the structure of
the final treatise. At the same time I began to write out
individual sections.

Every day I was aware of the great blessing that I could
save lives while others were forced to kill, and that at the
same time I could work toward the coming of the era of
peace.

Fortunately my supply of drugs and bandages did not
give out, for I had received a large supply of all necessary
items from one of the last boats to arrive before the outbreak
of war.

Because my wife’s health had suffered from the stifling
air of Lambarene, we spent the rainy season of 1916-1917
on the coast. A timber merchant provided us with a house
at Chienga near Cape Lopez at the mouth of one of the
tributaries of the Ogowe. It was the home of an employee

First Activities in Africa, 1913—1917 161

of his who had looked after the timber rafts, but as a con-
sequence of the war it now stood empty. In return for his
kindness I joined his African workers rolling the okoume
logs, which had already been tied together in rafts, onto
dry land. They then would be preserved from ship-worms
during the long interval that might elapse before cargoes
could again be shipped to Europe.

This heavy work — we often needed hours to roll up on
the shore a single log weighing from two to three tons —
was possible only at high tide. When the tide was low, I
sat with my Philosophy of Civilization, insofar as my time
was not claimed by patients.

Garaison and St. Remy

In September 1917, just after I had
resumed my work in Labarene, we re-
ceived orders to embark at once on the
next ship to Europe, to be placed in
a prisoner-of-war camp. Fortunately
the ship was a few days late, so with
the help of the missionaries and a few
Africans, we had time to pack our be-
longings, including drugs and instru-
ments, in cases and to stow them all
in a small corrugated-iron building.

It would have been useless to con-
sider taking the sketches for The Phi-
losophy of Civilization with me. They
might have been confiscated at any

162

Caraison and St. Remy 163

customs inspection. I therefore entrusted them to the
American missionary, Mr. Ford, who was then working at
Lambarene. He admitted to me that he would have pre-
ferred to throw the heavy packet into the river, because
he considered philosophy to be unnecessary and harmful.
However, out of Christian charity he was willing to keep it
and send it to me at the end of the war. To save what I had
already done in the event that something might happen to
it, I spent two nights writing a summary in French that con-
tained the main ideas and the sequence of the chapters already
finished. So that it would appear remote from actual life
and therefore inoffensive to the censors, I inserted chapter
headings to make it look like a historical study of the Ren-
aissance. As it turned out, I did in this way secure its escape
from confiscation, which on several occasions threatened it.

Two days before our departure, amid packed and half-
packed cases, I had to operate with all haste on a stran-
gulated hernia.

Just when we had been taken on board the river steamer
and the Africans were shouting to us an affectionate farewell
from the bank, the father superior of the Catholic mission
came onboard, waved aside with an authoritative gesture
the African soldiers who tried to prevent his approach, and
shook hands with us. “You shall not leave this country,” he
said, “without my thanking you both for all the good that
you have done.” We were never to see each other again.
Shortly after the war he lost his life on board the Afrique,
the ship that had taken us to Europe, when she was wrecked
in the Bay of Biscay.

At Cape Lopez a white man whose wife I had once treated
as a patient came up to me and offered me some money in
case I had none. How grateful I now was for the gold I had

164 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

taken with me on the chance that war might break out! An
hour before we started I had visited an English timber
merchant whom I knew well, and had exchanged it at a
favorable rate for French notes, which my wife and I now
carried sewn into our clothing.

On the liner we were put in charge of a white officer
who was obliged to see to it that we had no exchanges with
anyone except the steward specifically assigned to us, who
at certain appointed hours took us on deck. Since writing
was impossible, I filled my time with learning by heart
some of Bach’s fugues and Widor’s Sixth Organ Symphony.

Our steward — whose name, if I remember correctly, was
Gaillard — was very good to us. Toward the end of the voy-
age he asked us whether we had noticed that he had treated
us with special kindness considering that we were pris-
oners. “I always served your meals promptly, and your
cabin was just as clean as that of the others.” (This was an
accurate statement in view of the untidiness of the African
ships during the war.) “Can you guess,” he continued, “why
I did this? Certainly not because I expected a good tip.
One never expects that from prisoners. Why then? I’ll tell
you. A few months ago a Mr. Gaucher, whom you had had
as a patient for months in your hospital, traveled home in
this ship in one of my cabins. ‘Gaillard,’ he said to me, ‘it
may happen that before long you will be taking the Lam-
barene doctor to Europe as a prisoner. If he ever does
travel on your ship, and should you be able to help him in
any way, do so for my sake.’ Now you know why I took
such good care of you.”

For three weeks we were put in the caserne de passage
(temporary barracks) in the rue de Belleville at Bordeaux,

Caraison and St. R6my 165

where during the war interned foreigners were housed.
There I soon developed the symptoms of dysentery. For-
tunately I had in my baggage some emetine with which to
fight it. I suffered from this illness for a long time afterward,
however.

Next we were taken to the huge internment camp at
Garaison in the Pyrenees. We mistakenly failed to interpret
the order to make ourselves ready for departure during the
night as meaning that very night, so we had packed nothing
when around midnight two gendarmes came with a carriage
to take us away. They were angry at what they supposed
to be our disobedience, and since packing by the light of
one miserable candle was a very slow process, they became
impatient and wanted to take us off, leaving our baggage
behind. Finally, however, they had pity on us and even
helped us to collect our possessions and to stuff them into
our trunks. The memory of those two gendarmes has often
since then made me behave patiently with others when
impatience seemed justifiable!

When we were deposited at Garaison and the officer
on guard was inspecting our baggage, he stumbled onto
a French translation of the Politics of Aristotle, which I had
brought with me with a view to the work on The Philosophy
of Civilization. “Why, it’s incredible!” he stormed. “They’re
actually bringing political books into a prisoner-of-war camp!”
I timidly remarked to him that the book was written long
before the birth of Christ. “Hey, scholar, is that true?” he
asked of a soldier who was standing nearby. The latter
corroborated my statement. “What! You mean to say that
people talked politics as long ago as that?” he asked back.
Upon our answering in the affirmative, he gave his decision:
“Anyhow, we don’t say the same things about it today, and
as far as I am concerned you can keep your book. ”

1

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166 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

Garaison (Provencal for g uerison, “healing”) was once a
large monastery to which the sick came from long distances
on pilgrimages. After the separation of church and state it
stood empty and in a state of decay until, at the outbreak
of war, hundreds of aliens from enemy countries — men,
women, and children — were housed in it. In twelve months
it was restored to comparatively good condition by crafts-
men who were among the interned. The governor of the
camp was a retired colonial official named Vecchi, a theos-
ophist, who carried out his duties not only with fairness
but with kindness, a fact that was all the more gratefully
acknowledged because his predecessor had been strict and
harsh.

On the second day after our arrival, as I stood shivering
in the courtyard a prisoner introduced himself to me as
mill engineer Borkeloh, and asked what he could do to
assist me. He was in my debt, he said, because I had cured
his wife. That was the case, although I did not know the
wife any more than she knew me. It so happened that at
the beginning of the war I had given to the representative
of a Hamburg timber firm, Richard Classen by name, sent
from Lambarene to a prisoner-of-war camp in Dahomey, a
good supply of quinine, Blaud’s pills, emetine, arrhenal,
bromnatrium, sleeping drafts, and other drugs for himself
and the other prisoners whom he would meet. On each
bottle I had written detailed directions for use. From Da-
homey he was taken to France and found himself in the
same camp as Mr. Borkeloh and his wife. When Mrs. Bor-
keloh lost her appetite and suffered from depression, she
was given some of the drugs, which Mr. Classen had as if
by a miracle preserved through all the baggage inspections,
and she recovered. I now received my fee for this cure

Garaison and St. Remy 167

in the form of a table, which Mr. Borkeloh made for me
out of wood he had torn loose somewhere in the loft.
Now I could write . . . and play the organ. On the boat I
had already done some organ practice by using a table as
manual and the floor as pedals, as I had done when I was
a child.

A few days later I was asked by the eldest of some gypsy
musicians who were fellow prisoners whether I was the
Albert Schweitzer whose name occurred in Romain Rol-
land’s book Musiciens d’aujourd’hui. When I said yes, he
told me that he and his fellows would regard me from then
on as one of themselves. That meant that I might be present
when they played in the loft and that my wife and I would
be treated to a serenade on our birthdays. In fact my wife
did awake on her birthday to the sounds of the waltz from
The Tales of Hoffmann played with verve and style. These
gypsy performers, who used to play in the fashionable cafes
of Paris, had been allowed to keep their instruments as the
tools of their trade when they were taken prisoner, and
now they were allowed to practice in the camp.

Not long after our arrival some newcomers were brought
from another camp, which had been broken up. They at
once began to grumble about the poorly prepared food and
criticized their fellow prisoners who occupied the much
envied posts in the kitchen as not fit for their job. This
caused great indignation among the latter, who were profes-
sional cooks and had come to Garaison from the first-class
hotels and restaurants of Paris!

The matter came before the governor, and when he asked
the rebels which of them were cooks, it turned out that
there was not a single cook among them! Their leader was
a shoemaker, and the others were tailors, hatters, basket

168 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

weavers, and brush makers. In their previous camp, how-
ever, they had applied themselves to the cooking and de-
clared that they had mastered the art of preparing food in
large quantities so that it was just as tasty as when prepared
in small quantities. With Solomonic wisdom the governor
decided that they should take over the kitchen for a fort-
night as an experiment. If they did better than the others,
they should keep the posts. Otherwise they would be put
under lock and key as disturbers of the peace. On the very
first day they proved with potatoes and cabbage that they
had not claimed too much, and every succeeding day was
a new triumph. So the noncooks were appointed “cooks,”
and the professional cooks were turned out of the kitchen!
When I asked the shoemaker the secret of their success,
he replied: “One must know all sorts of things, but most
important is to do the cooking with love and care.” Now if
I learn that someone has been appointed minister of some
department in a field about which he knows nothing, I do
not get as excited over it as I used to. I keep calm and hope
that he will prove as fit for his job as the Garaison shoemaker
had proved to be for his.

Strange to say, I was the only physician among the in-
terned. When we arrived, the governor had strictly for-
bidden me to have anything to do with the sick, since
that was the business of the official camp doctor, an old
country practitioner from the neighborhood. Later on,
however, he thought it only just that I be allowed to let
the camp benefit from my professional knowledge, as it
did from that of the dentists, of whom there were several
among us. He even gave me a room to use for this pur-
pose. As my baggage contained chiefly drugs and instru-
ments, which the sergeant had let me retain after the

Garaison and St. Remy 169

inspection, I had almost everything that I needed for treat-
ment of the sick. I was able to give especially effective help
to those who had been brought there from the colonies, as
well as to the many sailors who were suffering from tropical
diseases.

Thus I was once more a doctor. What leisure time I had
left I devoted to The Philosophy of Civilization and to prac-
ticing the organ on the table and the floor.

As a physician I got a glimpse of the manifold misery that
prevailed in the camp. The worst off were those who suf-
fered mentally from confinement. From the moment we
could go down into the courtyard until the trumpet signal
that at dusk drove us back, they kept walking round and
round looking out over the walls at the glorious white shim-
mering chain of the Pyrenees. They no longer had the
stamina to occupy themselves with anything. When it
rained, they stood about apathetically in the passages. In
addition, most of them suffered from malnutrition, because
they had gradually developed a distaste for the monotonous
fare, although it was acceptable for a prisoner-of-war camp.
Many suffered from the cold as well, since most of the rooms
could not be heated. For these people, weakened in body
and soul, the slightest ailment meant a real illness that was
very hard to get at and treat successfully. In many cases
the depression was prolonged by lamentation over loss of
the position they had secured in a foreign land. They did
not know where they would go or what they would do when
the gates of Garaison opened and let them out. Many had
married French women and had children who could speak
nothing but French. Could they be asked to leave their

170 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

homeland? Could they face the struggle of finding accep-
tance and employment in a new land?

The children of the camp, pale and freezing, and most
of them only French-speaking, fought continuous battles
in the courtyard and the corridors. Some were for the en-
tente; some were on the side of the central European pow-
ers.

To anyone who kept in some measure healthy and vig-
orous the camp offered much of interest, owing to the fact
that people from many nations and of almost every profes-
sion were to be found there. There were scholars and art-
ists, especially painters, who had been caught in Paris by
the war; German and Austrian shoemakers and dressmakers
who had been employed by the big Paris firms; bank di-
rectors, hotel managers, waiters, engineers, architects,
craftsmen, and businessmen who had made their homes in
France and her colonies; Catholic missionaries and mem-
bers of religious orders from the Sahara, wearing white
robes with the red fez; traders from Liberia and other dis-
tricts on the West Coast of Africa; merchants and com-
mercial travelers from North America, South America,
China, and India who had been taken prisoner on the high
seas; the crews of German and Austrian merchant ships
who had suffered the same fate; Turks, Arabs, Greeks, and
nationals of the Balkan States who for various reasons had
been deported during the course of operations in the east,
and among them Turks with wives who went about veiled.
What a motley picture did the courtyard offer twice a day
when the roll was called!

No books were needed in the camp to improve one’s
education. For everything one might want to learn, there
were men with specialized knowledge at one’s disposal.

Garaison and St. R6my 171

and from this unique opportunity for learning I profited
greatly. About finances, architecture, factory building and
equipment, grain growing, furnace building, and many
other things, I picked up information I could probably
never have acquired elsewhere.

Perhaps the worst sufferers were the craftsmen, con-
demned to idleness. When my wife secured some material
for a warm dress, quite a number of tailors offered to make
it for nothing, merely in order to have some cloth in their
hands once more, and needle and thread between their
fingers.

Permission to help the farmers of the neighborhood in
their work was sought not only by those who knew some-
thing about agriculture but by many who were accustomed
to physical work of any sort. Those who displayed the least
desire for activity were the numerous sailors. Their life-
style onboard ship had taught them how to pass the time
together in the simplest ways.

At the beginning of 1918 we were informed that a certain
number of the “notables” in the camp would be chosen by
last names from each letter of the alphabet and sent to a
reprisals camp in North Africa — if I remember rightly —
unless by a certain date the measures being taken by the
Germans against the civilian population of Belgium were
not suspended. We were all advised to send this news
home so that our relatives might do whatever necessary
to save us from this fate. “Notables,” i.e., bank directors,
hotel managers, merchants, scholars, artists, and such
folk, were chosen because it was assumed that their fate
would attract more attention in their home districts than
that of the obscure majority. This proclamation brought
to light the fact that among our notables were many

172 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

persons who were not notable at all. Head waiters, when
delivered here, had given their profession as hotel di-
rectors so as to count for something in the camp; shop
assistants had elevated themselves to the rank of mer-
chants. Now they lamented the danger that threatened
them on account of the fictitious ranks they had assumed.
However, all ended well. The measures being taken against
the Belgians were rescinded and Garaison’s notables,
whether genuine or fake, had for the present no reprisals
camp to fear.

After a long and severe winter, spring came at last, and
with it an order that my wife and I were to be sent to a
camp intended for Alsatians only, at St. Remy de Pro-
vence. In vain we begged for the rescinding of this order —
the governor, that he might keep his camp doctor, and
we, that we might remain in the camp where we felt at
home.

At the end of March we were transferred to St. Remy.
The camp was not as cosmopolitan as the one at Garaison.
It was occupied chiefly by teachers, foresters, and railway
employees. But I met there many people I knew, among
them the young Giinsbach schoolmaster, John litis, and a
young pastor named Liebrich, who had been one of my
students. He had permission to hold services on Sundays
and, as his curate, I was given a good many opportunities
to preach.

The governor, a retired police commissioner from Mar-
seilles named Bagnaud, had established benign rules. Char-
acteristic of his jovial temperament was the answer he used
to give to the question whether such-and-such a thing was

Garaison and St. Remy 173

permitted. “Rien n est permis! Mais il y a des choses qui
sont tolerees, si vous vous montrez raisonnables!” (“Noth-
ing is permitted! But there are certain things that are tol-
erated, if you show yourselves reasonable!”) Since he could
not pronounce my name he used to call me Monsieur Al-
bert.

The first time I entered the big room on the ground floor
where we spent the day it struck me as being strangely
familiar in its unadorned and bare ugliness. Where had I
seen that iron stove and the flue pipe stretching across the
room from one end to another? Eventually the mystery was
solved: I knew them from a drawing of van Gogh. The N
building in which we were housed, once a monastery inside
a walled garden, had until recently been occupied by men- j
tal patients. Among them at one time had been van Gogh,
who immortalized with his pencil the desolate room in
which today we in our turn were sitting. Like us, he had
suffered from the cold stone floor when the mistral blew!
Like us, he had walked round and round behind those high
walls!

As one of the interned was a doctor, I had nothing to do
with the sick at first, and could spend the whole day with
my notes for my philosophy of Western civilization. Later
on, my colleague was exchanged and allowed to go home,
and I became camp doctor, but the work was not as heavy
as at Garaison.

My wife’s health had improved considerably in the moun-
tain climate of Garaison, but now she suffered from the
harsh winds of Provence. She could not get used to the
stone floors. I too felt far from well. Ever since my attack
of dysentery at Bordeaux I had been aware of a continually
increasing weariness, which I tried in vain to master. I tired

174 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

easily, and we were both unable to join in the walks the
camp inmates were allowed to take on certain days, es-
corted by the guards. The walks were always at a rapid
pace because the prisoners wanted to get as much exercise
out of them as possible and to go as far from camp as time
permitted. We were thankful indeed that on those days the
governor used to take us and other weak prisoners out
himself.

Back in Alsace

For the sake of my wife, who suffered
greatly from confinement and from
homesickness, I was glad indeed
when, around the middle of July, we
were told that we were all, or nearly
all, going to be exchanged and should
be able to return home via Switzerland
in a few days. Fortunately my wife did
not notice that my name was missing
from the list the governor had been
given of those to be released. On July
12, at midnight, we were awakened.
An order had been received by tele-
graph that we should at once make our
preparations for departure. This time

175

176 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

every name was on the list. As the sun rose we dragged
our baggage into the courtyard for inspection. I was allowed
to take with me the notes for The Philosophy of Civilization,
which I had committed to paper here and at Garaison and
which had already been checked by the camp censor, after
he had put his stamp upon a certain number of pages. As
the convoy passed through the gate I ran back to see the
governor once more, and found him sitting sorrowfully in
his office. He grieved over the departure of his prisoners.
We still write to each other, and he addresses me as “mon
cher pensionnaire” (my dear boarder).

At the station at Tarascon we had to wait in a distant
shed for the arrival of our train. When it came, my wife
and I, burdened with heavy luggage, could hardly move.
A poor cripple whom I had treated in the camp came for-
ward to help us. He had no baggage because he had no
possessions, and I was much moved by his offer, which I
accepted. While we walked along side by side in the scorch-
ing sun, I vowed to myself that in memory of him I would
in future always keep a lookout at stations for heavily laden
people and help them. And I have kept this vow. On one
occasion, however, my offer made me the suspect of thiev-
ish intentions!

Between Tarascon and Lyons we were charmingly re-
ceived at one station by a committee of ladies and gentle-
men and escorted to tables loaded with good food. While
we were enjoying ourselves, however, our hosts became
curiously embarrassed, and after a few hurried words to
each other, they withdrew. They had realized that we were
not the guests for whom the welcome and the meal had
been intended. They were expecting refugees from occu-
pied territory in northern France, who were being dis-

Back in Alsace 177

patched by the Germans to France through Switzerland
after a brief internment, and would now stay for a time in
southern France.

When the arrival of a train d’internes had been an-
nounced, the committee that had been formed to look after
these refugees as they passed through took it for granted
that we were the travelers they were expecting, and they
had only become aware of their mistake when they heard
their guests speaking not French but Alsatian. The situation
was so comical that it ended with the disillusioned com-
mittee joining good-humoredly in the laughter. But best of
all most of our party were so busy eating that they noticed
nothing since it all happened so quickly, and they journeyed
on in the sincere belief that they had done fitting honor to
a good meal that had been intended for them.

During the remainder of the journey our train grew
longer and longer as the coaches from other camps were
added to it one after another at different stations. Two of
them were filled with basket and kettle menders, scissors
grinders, tramps, and gypsies, who were also being ex-
changed.

At the Swiss frontier our train was held up for a consid-
erable time until a telegram brought the news that the train
conveying the people for whom we were being exchanged
had also reached the Swiss frontier.

Early on July 15 we arrived at Zurich. To my astonish-
ment I was called out of the train by Arnold Meyer, the
professor of theology, Robert Kaufmann, the singer, and
other friends who had gathered to welcome me. They had
known for weeks that I was coming.

During the journey to Constance we stood at the win-
dows and could not see enough of the well-cultivated fields

178 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

and the clean houses of Switzerland. We could hardly grasp
the fact that we were in a country that had not been affected
by the war.

The impression we received in Constance was dreadful.
Here we had before our eyes for the first time the starvation
of which until then we had only known by hearsay. Only
pale, emaciated people in the streets. How wearily they
went about! It was surprising that they could still stand.

My wife received permission to go immediately to Stras-
bourg with her parents, who had come to meet us. I had
to spend another day in Constance with the others and wait
until all the necessary formalities were completed. I
reached Strasbourg during the night. Not a light was burn-
ing in the streets. Not a glimmer of light shining from any
dwelling. The city had to be completely dark on account
of air attacks. I could not hope to reach the distant garden
suburb where my wife’s parents lived, and I had consid-
erable trouble finding the way to Frau Fischer’s house near
St. Thomas.

Since Giinsbach was within the sphere of military opera-
tions, many office visits and papers were needed to obtain
permission to find my father. Trains still ran as far as Col-
mar, but the ten miles from there toward the Vosges had
to be covered on foot.

So this was the peaceful valley that I had left on Good
Friday, 1913. There were dull roars from guns in the moun-
tains. On the roads one walked between lines of wire net-
ting packed with straw, as between high walls. These were
intended to hide the traffic in the valley from the enemy
batteries on the crest of the Vosges.

Back in Alsace 179

Everywhere there were concrete emplacements for ma-
chine guns. Houses ruined by gunfire. Hills that I had
remembered as covered with woods now stood bare. The
shell fire had left only a few stumps here and there. In the
villages orders were posted that everyone must carry a gas
mask with him at all times.

Gunsbach was the last inhabited village before the
trenches. Hidden by the surrounding mountains, it had not
been destroyed by the artillery fire on the heights of the
Vosges. Among crowds of soldiers and between lines of
battered houses the inhabitants went about their business
as if there were no war going on. That they could not bring
the second hay crop home from the meadows by day
seemed as natural to them as rushing to the cellars when-
ever the alarm sounded, or the fact that they might at any
moment receive an order to evacuate the village on short
notice if an attack was imminent, forcing them to leave all
their possessions behind.

My father had become so indifferent to danger that he
remained in his study during the bombardments, when
most people went to their cellars. He could hardly remem-
ber a time when he had not shared the vicarage with officers
and soldiers.

Anxiety about the harvest, however, weighed heavily on
people who had otherwise become indifferent to the war.
A terrible drought prevailed. The grain was drying up; the
potatoes were ruined; on many meadows the grass crop was
so thin that it was not worth mowing; from the stables
resounded the bellows of hungry cattle. Even if a storm
cloud rose above the horizon it brought not rain but wind,
which robbed the soil of its remaining moisture, and clouds
of dust adumbrating the specter of starvation.

180 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

Meanwhile my wife also had obtained permission to come
to Giinsbach.

I hoped in vain that among my native hills I should rid
myself of the fatigue and the now slight, now severe attacks
of the fever from which I had suffered since the last weeks
at St. Remy. From day to day I felt worse until, toward
the end of August, a high-fever attack followed by violent
pains made me realize that these were the aftereffects of
the dysentery I had contracted at Bordeaux and that an
immediate operation was necessary. Accompanied by my
wife, I dragged myself six kilometers toward Colmar before
we could find a vehicle of any sort. On September 1 1 was
operated on by Professor Stolz in Strasbourg.

As soon as I was able to do some work, the mayor of
Strasbourg, Mr. Schwander, offered me a position as a
doctor at the municipal hospital, an offer that I joyfully
accepted, for I really did not know how I was going to live.
I was put in charge of two women’s wards in the derma-
tology department. At the same time I was appointed curate
at St. Nicholai once more. I am also deeply indebted to
the Chapter of St. Thomas for placing at my disposal the
unoccupied parsonage that belonged to the church on the
quay of St. Nicholai, although, being only a curate, I had
no claim on it.

After the armistice, when Alsace was returned from Ger-
man rule to French, I was for some time alone in charge
of the services at St. Nicholai. Mr. Gerold, who had been
removed from his post by the German administration be-
cause of his anti-German pronouncements, had not yet
been reappointed by the French, and Mr. Ernst, the suc-
cessor to Mr. Knittel, had been compelled to resign because
of his anti-French views.

Back in Alsace 181

During the armistice period and the following two years
I was a familiar figure to the customs officials at the Rhine
Bridge because I frequently went over to Kehl with a knap-
sack full of provisions for starving friends in Germany. I
made a special point of helping in this way Frau Cosima
Wagner and the aged painter Hans Thoma, together with
his sister Agatha. I had known Hans Thoma for years
through Frau Charlotte Schumm, whose late husband had
been his childhood friend.

Physician and Preacher
in Strasbourg

I hoped to spend the little free time
my two jobs left me with Bach’s choral
preludes. As soon as I could reclaim
the manuscript I had drafted at Lam-
barene, I wanted to finish the last three
volumes for the American publisher.
But as the parcel seemed never to
come and the American publisher
showed no desire to rush into publi-
cation, I put this work aside and took
up The Philosophy of Civilization.

While waiting for The Philosophy of
Civilization manuscript from Africa, I
busied myself with studying the great
world religions and their conception of

Physician and Preacher in Strasbourg 183

the world. As I had examined philosophy in order to see
how far it affirms ethical acceptance of the world as a major
force in civilization, so now I sought to find out to what
extent acceptance and rejection of the world and ethics are
contained in Judaism and Christianity, in Islam, in the
religion of Zarathustra, in Brahminism, Buddhism, and
Hinduism, and in Chinese religious thought.

In this investigation I found full confirmation of my view
that civilization is based upon ethical acceptance of the
world.

The religions that expressly reject the world and life (Brah-
minism and Buddhism) show no interest in civilization.
While these pessimistic religions leave man to solitary con-
templation, the Judaism of the prophetic period, the almost
contemporary religion of Zarathustra, and the religious
thought of the Chinese contain in their ethical acceptance
of the world strong forces that stimulate civilization. They
seek to improve social conditions and to call men to pur-
poseful action in the service of common goals that ought to
be realized.

The Jewish prophets Amos and Isaiah (760-700 b.c.),
Zarathustra (seventh century B.C.), and Cong-tse (560-480
B.c.) mark the great turning point in the spiritual history
of mankind. Between the eighth and sixth centuries B.c.
thinkers from three nations, living in widely separated
countries and having no relations whatever with one an-
other, came at the same time to the conclusion that the
ethical consists not in submission to traditional customs,
but in the active devotion of the individual to his fellow
men or to the improvement of social conditions. In this
great revolution begins the spiritual progress of mankind
and, with it, the highest potential for the development of
civilization.

184 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

Christianity and Hinduism are neither completely pos-
itive nor negative in their attitude toward the world; both
contain the two principles side by side yet in a state of
tension with each other. In consequence they can both
accept and reject civilization.

Christianity has a negative attitude toward civilization
because in the beginning it expected the world to end. For
that reason it shows no interest in improving conditions in
the natural world. But at the same time, as it contains an
active ethic, it vigorously affirms civilization.

In the ancient world, Christianity was a force destructive
to civilization. It was partly responsible for the failure of
later Stoicism to reform the world and develop ethical
human values. The ethical views of the later Stoicism, as
we know them from the writings of Epictetus and others,
came very near to those of Jesus. The fact remains, how-
ever, that Christianity was linked to a negative view of life.

In modem times, under the influence of the Reforma-
tion, the Renaissance, and the thinkers of the Enlighten-
ment, Christianity changed its negative attitude toward the
world. In primitive Christianity the expectation of the end
of the world had not allowed the acceptance of the world.
With the affirmation of life, Christianity changed into a
religion that could work for, even create, civilization. As
such a religion it joined in the struggle against ignorance,
want of purpose, cruelty, and injustice, out of which in
modem times a new world emerged. Only because the
strong ethical energies of Christianity and of European phi-
losophy joined forces in their desire for furtherance of the
idea of affirmation of life, and because they put themselves
at the service of society, could the seventeenth and eigh-
teenth centuries develop the civilization of which we are
the beneficiaries.

Yet, as the negation of the world and life were rejected
in the eighteenth century, certain tendencies evident in
the Middle Ages and post-Middle Ages reappeared. Chris-

Physician and Preacher in Strasbourg 185

tianity ceased to be a creative force in civilization, as we
have ample opportunity to see in our own times.

In Hinduism affirmation never overcame the negative
attitude toward life and the world. In India a break with
the traditional pessimism never occurred like the one
brought about by powerful thinkers in the Christianity of
the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. In
spite of its ethical aspirations, Hinduism, therefore, was
never in a position to accomplish in the Orient what Chris-
tianity was able to do for civilization in the same period.

Islam can be called a world religion only by virtue of its
broad base. Spiritually it could not develop fully, because
it was not based on any deep thought of the world or man-
kind. If ever any such thought stirred within it, it was
suppressed in order to maintain the authority of tradition.
Nevertheless the Islam of today carries within it stronger
tendencies toward mysticism and greater ethical depth than
appears on the surface.

While I was busy with these studies, a few days before
Christmas, 1919, I received an invitation from Archbishop
Nathan Soderblom to deliver some lectures after Easter for
the Olaus-Petri Foundation at the University of Uppsala.
The invitation came as a complete surprise. In my isolation
at Strasbourg, ever since the war I had felt rather like a
coin that has rolled under a piece of furniture and has been
forgotten there. Only once — in October 1919 — had I been
in touch with the outer world. With great difficulty I ob-
tained a passport and visa and, scraping together every
penny I could, I went to Barcelona to let my friends from
the Orfeo Catald once more hear me play the organ. This
first foray into the world allowed me to see that as an artist
I was still appreciated.

186 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

On the return journey from Tarascon to Lyons, I had as
fellow passengers some sailors belonging to the cruiser Er-
nest Renan. When I asked them what sort of man it was whose
name they had on their caps, they answered: “We’ve never
been told; it’s probably the name of some dead general.”

In academic circles I could have believed myself entirely
forgotten but for the affection and kindness of the theolo-
gians at Zurich and Bern.

For my lectures in Uppsala I chose as subject the problem
of affirmation of the world and of ethics in philosophy and
world religions. When I began work on the lectures I was
still without my chapters from The Philosophy of Civili-
zation that had been left behind in Africa, so I had to write
them over again. At first I was very unhappy about this,
but I later realized that this repetition was not unprofitable,
and I became reconciled to my fate. It was not until the
summer of 1920, after my return from Uppsala, that the
manuscript from Africa at last reached me.

In Uppsala for the first time I found an echo of the
thoughts I had been carrying about with me for five years.
In the last lecture, in which I developed the fundamental
ideas of the principle of Reverence for Life, I was so moved
that I found it difficult to speak.

I came to Sweden a tired, depressed, and still ailing
man — for in the summer of 1919 I had had to undergo a
second operation. In the magnificent air of Uppsala and the
kind atmosphere of the archbishop’s house, in which my
wife and I were guests, I recovered my health and once
more found joy in my work.

But there still weighed on me the burden of the debts I
had contracted with the Paris Missionary Society and Pa-

Physician and Preacher in Strasbourg 187

risian acquaintances to keep the hospital open during the
war. While we were walking together, the archbishop
learned of my worries and suggested I give organ recitals
and lectures in Sweden, a country in which considerable
wealth had accumulated during the war. He also gave me
introductions in several cities.

Elias Soderstrom, a student of theology (who died as a
missionary a few years later), offered to be my traveling
companion. Standing by me on the platform or in the pulpit
he translated my lectures on the forest hospital, sentence
by sentence, in such a lively way that in a few moments
the audience had forgotten that they were listening to a
translation. How fortunate that in the services at Lamba-
rene I had acquired the art of speaking through an inter-
preter.

The essential technique involves speaking in short, sim-
ple, and clearly constructed sentences, very carefully going
through the talk with the interpreter beforehand, and faith-
fully following the version with which he is familiar. With
this preparation the interpreter has to make no effort to
understand the meaning of the sentence being translated;
he catches it like a ball that he relays immediately to the
listeners. By following this plan it is possible to deliver
even scientific papers through an interpreter. It is much
better than for the speaker to inflict on himself and his
hearers the torture of speaking in a language he only knows
imperfectly.

Though they are not large, the wonderfully resonant old
Swedish organs pleased me greatly. They were admirably
adapted to my method of rendering Bach’s music.

In the course of a few weeks I had earned through con-
certs and lectures so much money that I could pay off the
most pressing of my debts.

188 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

When in the middle of July I left Sweden, where my
experience had been so happy, I firmly made up my mind
to resume my work at Lambarene. Until then I had not
ventured to think of it, but had instead considered the idea
of returning to a university career. Some hints before my
departure for Sweden pointed to Switzerland as the country
where this might be possible. In 1920 I was made an Hon-
orable Doctor of Divinity by the theological faculty at Zu-
rich.

The Book of African
Reminiscences

At home again I set to work at once
writing down my recollections of Africa
under the title Zwischen Wasser und
Urtoald (On the Edge of the Primeval
Forest). The Lindblad publishing
house in Uppsala had commissioned
me to write such a book, but it was not
an easy task for they had restricted me
to a given number of words. When I
had finished I had to cut several thou-
sand words, and that process was more
difficult than writing the entire book.
In the end, the complete chapter about
the timber trade in the jungle would
have had to have been dropped, but

189

190 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

after my urgent pleas the publisher accepted the manu-
script with this supplementary section still intact.

That I was compelled to count words for that book was
good for me. Since then I have disciplined myself — even
in my Philosophy of Civilization — to achieve the greatest
possible economy of expression.

Z wischen Wasser und Urwald appeared in Swedish,
translated by Baroness Greta Lagerfelt, in 1921. In the
same year it came out in German (first in Switzerland),
and then in English with the title On the Edge of the
Primeval Forest , translated by my friend C. T. Campion.
Later on it was published in Dutch, French, Danish, and
Finnish.

It was illustrated mainly with photographs by Richard
Classen of Hamburg. In 1914 he had been in Lambarene
purchasing lumber, and later I supplied him with medicines
when he was a prisoner of war.

To give an account of my activity in a West African pri-
meval forest gave me a chance to express views on the
difficult problems among primitive people caused by col-
onization.

Have we whites the right to impose our rule on primitive
and semiprimitive peoples? My answer to this question is
based only on my own experience before and after World
War I. No, if we want only to rule and draw material ad-
vantage from their country. Yes, if we seriously desire to
educate them and help them to attain a state of well-being.
If there was any possibility that these peoples could live
by and for themselves, we should leave them to themselves.
It is, however, a fact that world trade has penetrated these
areas to such an extent that the clock cannot be turned

The Book of African Reminiscences 191

back. Through world trade they have lost their freedom.
The economic and social conditions under which the African
people once lived have been destroyed. An inevitable result
has been that the chiefs, using the weapons and money l
that commerce has placed at their disposal, have reduced |
most of their people to servitude and turned them into 1
slaves who must work for the benefit of a small minority j
controlling the export trade. *

Sometimes, as in the days of the slave trade, the people
themselves have become merchandise to be exchanged for
money, lead, gunpowder, tobacco, and brandy.

That many among those who took possession of colonial
territories committed injustice, violence, and cruelty is only
too true, and this puts a heavy burden of responsibility on
us. And still today the harm we inflict on the Africans should
not be passed over in silence or concealed. To grant in- ^
dependence to the native peoples in our colonies now
would inevitably lead to exploitation by their own coun-
trymen and would in no way make up for our failures.

Our only possible course is to exercise the power we
have for the benefit of the native people and thus justify
morally what we do. Even colonization can allege some acts
of moral value. It has put an end to the slave trade; it has
stopped the perpetual wars that the African peoples for-
merly waged with one another, and it has thus established
a lasting peace in large portions of the world. It endeavors
in many ways to produce in the colonies conditions that
render more difficult the exploitation of the population by
world trade. I dare not picture what the lot of the native
lumbermen in the forests of the Ogowe district would be
if the government authorities, who at the present time
protect their rights against the merchants, both white and
black, were withdrawn.

The tragic fact is that the interests of colonization and those
of civilization do not necessarily run parallel, but are often

192 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

in direct opposition to each other. It would be best if
primitive people were to withdraw as much as possible from
world commerce. Then under judicious administration they
could gradually move from a nomadic or seminomadic life
to a settled existence as farmers and artisans. That, how-
ever, is impossible because the people themselves refuse
to walk away from the chance of earning money by selling
goods on the world market, just as world trade is not likely
to refrain from purchasing raw materials from them in ex-
change for manufactured goods. Thus it becomes very dif-
ficult to pursue a program of colonization that would lead
toward a real civilization. These people could achieve true
wealth if they could develop their agriculture and trade to
meet their own needs. Instead they are only interested in
producing what the world market requires, and for which
it pays well. With the money thus obtained they procure
from it manufactured goods and processed food, thereby
making home industry unnecessary, and often even en-
dangering the stability of their own agriculture. This is the
condition in which all primitive and semiprimitive peoples
who can offer to world trade rice, cotton, coffee, cocoa,

_ minerals, timber, and other products find themselves.

Whenever the timber trade is good, famine reigns in the
Ogowe region, because the villagers abandon their farms
to fell as many trees as possible. In the swamps and the
forest in which they find this work they live on imported
rice and iinported processed foods, which they purchase
with the proceeds of their labor.

Civilized colonization must make an effort to avoid
employing anyone for the export trade whose labor is
needed in the domestic market, especially in agriculture.
The sparser the population of a colony, the more diffi-
cult it is to reconcile the healthy development of the area
with the interests of world trade. An increasing export
trade does not always prove that a colony is making

The Book of African Reminiscences 193

progress; it can as easily mean that it is on its way to ruin.

Road and railway construction also creates a difficult
problem among local populations. Roads and railways are
necessary to end the horrible custom of portage, to bring
food to regions threatened by famine, and to develop the
trade of the country. At the same time there is a danger
that they may imperil the prosperity of the country. They
do so when they demand more labor than the country can
normally accommodate. Account must be taken, too, of the
fact that colonial road and railway construction involves
great loss of human life, even when — and this is unfortu-
nately not always the case — the best possible provision is
made for the lodging and board of the laborers. It can also
happen that the district the road or the railway was meant
to serve is instead ruined by it. The opening up of any
region must therefore be embarked upon with the greatest
care. Whatever the plan projected, it must be implemented
gradually, perhaps even with interruptions so the project
can be reviewed. Experience has shown that in this way
many lives can be saved.

In the interests of developing the country it may become
necessary to transplant remote villages nearer to the railway
or the road. But only when no other course is possible
should there be interference of this kind, or with any of
the human rights of the local people.

How much disaffection is caused again and again in the
colonies by regulations issued by some official who wants
to draw attention to himself! With regard to the much
debated issue of forced labor, I feel strongly that the Af-
ricans should under no circumstances be forced by the
authorities to work, whether for a short or longer period,
whether for private enterprise or as compensation for taxes.
People should only be asked to perform tasks that are in
the public interest, and this should be supervised by state
officials. We should never force the African to work by de-

194 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

manding ever-increasing taxes. He will, of course, have to
work in order to pay taxes, but hidden forced labor will no
more change him from an idle into an industrious man than
open demands. Injustice cannot produce a moral result.

In every colony in the world today the taxes are already
so high that they can be paid by the population only with
difficulty. Without much thought, colonies everywhere
have been burdened with loans the interest on which can
hardly be raised.

The problems of educating people are related to eco-
nomic and social problems and are no less complicated.
Farming and crafts are the foundations of civilization. Only
where that foundation exists can a portion of the population
engage in commercial and intellectual professions.

It is the misfortune of all colonies — and not only of those
\ with primitive or semiprimitive populations — that those
\ who go through the schools are then for the most part lost
|to agriculture and crafts. Instead of contributing to the
.development of both, the change of status has led to un-
/ Wealthy economic and social conditions. Constructive col-
/ onization means educating the local people in such a way
I that they are not alienated from agriculture and crafts but
\ attracted to them. Intellectual learning should be accom-
panied in every colonial school by the acquisition of every
kind of manual skill. For their civilization it is important
that the Africans learn to bake bricks, to build, to saw logs
into planks, to be ready with hammer, plane, and chisel.

But the most important thing of all is that we stop the
annihilation of the primitive and semiprimitive peoples.
Their existence is threatened by alcohol, which commerce
provides, by diseases we have taken to them, and by dis-
eases that had already existed among them but which, like
sleeping sickness, were first spread by the traffic that col-
onization brought with it. Today that disease is a peril to
millions.

The harm that the importation of alcohol brings to these

The Book of African Reminiscences 195

people cannot be remedied by forbidding brandy and rum
while allowing wine and beer as before. In the colonies
wine and beer are much more dangerous beverages than
in Europe, because, to preserve them in tropical and sub-
tropical regions, pure alcohol is always added. The absence
of brandy and rum is amply made up for by an enormously
increased consumption of this fortified wine and beer. The
only way to prevent the damage that alcohol brings to these
people is to completely prohibit all alcoholic beverages.

In nearly all colonies the struggle against disease has been
undertaken with too little energy and was begun too late.
The need to bring medical help to the people in our colonies
is frequently argued on the ground that it is worthwhile to
preserve the “human resource” without which the colonies
would lose their value. In reality, however, the issue is
quite different. It is unthinkable that we civilized peoples
should keep for ourselves alone those means for fighting
sickness, pain, and death that science has given us. If there
is any ethical thinking at all among us, how can we refuse
to let these new discoveries benefit those in distant lands
who are subject to even greater physical distress than we
are? In addition to the physicians who are sent out by the
governments, and of whom there are never enough to ac-
complish a fraction of what needs doing, other doctors must
go out to the colonies as a humane duty mandated by the
conscience of society. Whoever among us has learned
through personal experience what pain and anxiety really
are must help to ensure that those out there who are in
physical need obtain the same help that once came to him.
He no longer belongs to himself alone; he has become the
brother of all who suffer. It is this “brotherhood of those
who bear the mark of pain” that demands humane medical
services for the colonies. Commissioned by their represen-
tatives, medical people must do for the suffering in far-off
lands what cries out to be done in the name of true civi-
lization.

196 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

It was because I relied on the elementary truth embodied
in this idea, the “brotherhood of those who bear the mark
of pain,” that I ventured to found the forest hospital at
Lambarene.

Finally, I must insist that whatever benefit we confer
upon the peoples of our colonies is not charity, but atone-
ment for the terrible sufferings we white people have in-
flicted upon them ever since the day our first ship found
its way to their shores. The colonial problems that exist
today cannot be solved by political measures alone. A new
element must be introduced; white and black must meet
in an atmosphere infused with an ethical spirit. Only then
will communication be possible.

Giinsbach and
Journeys Abroad

On the Sunday before Palm Sunday in
1921, I had the pleasure of playing the
organ at the premiere of Bach’s St.
Matthew Passion at the Orfe6 CataK
in Barcelona — the very first time this
work was performed in Spain.

In April 1921, I resigned my two
posts at Strasbourg, hoping that I
could live in the future by my pen
and my organ recitals. In order to work
in peace on The Philosophy of Civili-
zation I moved with my wife and
child — a daughter bom to us on Jan-
uary 14, my own birthday, in 1919 —
to my father’s vicarage at Giinsbach.

197

198 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

For a pied-i-terre in Strasbourg, where I often had to
spend considerable periods of time using the library, I
had an attic room at the home of Pastor Dietz-Harter’s
widow, who lived in an old house in the rue d’ail (Garlic
Street).

My work was often interrupted by travel. Various uni-
versities invited me to give lectures on the philosophy of
civilization or on the problems of primitive Christianity.
Through lectures about the hospital at Lambarene I raised
funds for its continuation. With organ recitals I was able to
secure my own and my family’s future after I returned to
Africa.

In the autumn of 1921 1 was in Switzerland, and from there
I went in November to Sweden. At the end of January I
left Sweden for Oxford to deliver the Dale Memorial Lec-
tures at Mansfield College. After that I lectured at Selly
Oak College in Birmingham (on “Christianity and the Re-
ligions of the World”), at Cambridge (on “The Significance
of Eschatology”), and in London to the Society for the Study
of Religion (on “The Pauline Problem”). I also gave a num-
ber of organ recitals in England.

In the middle of March 1922, I returned to Sweden from
England to give more concerts and lectures. No sooner was
I home than I set forth again for weeks to give lectures and
concerts in Switzerland.

In the summer of 1922 I was allowed to work on The
Philosophy of Civilization undisturbed. In the autumn I
went again to Switzerland, and after that I gave some
lectures on ethics at Copenhagen at the invitation of
the university’s department of theology. These were fol-

Gunsbach and Journeys Abroad 199

lowed by organ recitals and lectures in various towns of
Denmark.

In January 1923, I lectured on the philosophy of civili-
zation at Prague, at the invitation of Professor Oscar Kraus.
I thus began a warm friendship with that loyal pupil of
Brentano.

How wonderful were the experiences of these years! When
I first went to Africa I prepared to make three sacrifices:
to abandon the organ; to renounce academic teaching ac-
tivities, to which I had become quite attached; and to lose
my financial independence and rely for the rest of my life
on the help of friends.

I had begun to make these three sacrifices, and only my
intimate friends knew what they cost me. But then it hap-
pened to me what happened to Abraham when he prepared
to sacrifice his son. Like him, I was spared the sacrifice.
Thanks to my good health and thanks to the piano with the
attached pedals that the Bach Society of Paris had given
me as a present, I had been able to maintain my organ
technique in the tropical climate. During the many peaceful
hours I was able to spend with Bach during my four and a
half years in the jungle I had penetrated deeper into the
spirit of his works. I returned to Europe, therefore, not as
an artist who had become an amateur, but in full possession
of my technique.

For the renunciation of my teaching activities at the Uni-
versity of Strasbourg I found compensation in opportunities
for lecturing at many other universities. So if I did for a
time lose my financial independence, I was now able to
win it back again with the organ and my books. The fact

200 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

that I was spared the triple sacrifice that I had already made
sustained me through all the difficulties the postwar years
brought to me and to so many others. I was prepared to
face hard work and renunciation.

In the spring of 1923 the first two volumes of The Philosophy
of Civilization were completed, and they were published
that same year. The first bears the title Verfall und Wie-
deraufbau der Kultur ( The Decay and Restoration of Civ-
ilization) and the second Kultur und Ethik ( Civilization and
Ethics).

Tim term SJaui ml and ethical are basica lly synonymous.
They define whatever conforms to establishe d custom.
Moral derives from the Latin and ethic from the Greek. In
general use the term morals relates to moral precepts and
conduct, while ethics comprises the science of morals and
scholarship on notions of the Good.

In the book on The Decay and Restoration of Civilization
I describe the relationship between civilization and world-
view.

I show that the philosophy of the nineteenth century is
responsible for the decline of civilization. It did not know
how to keep alive the concern for civilization that existed
in the period of the Enlightenment. It should have contin-
ued the unfinished work of the eighteenth century and
explained the natural, fundamental bond between ethics
and our concept of the world. Instead the nineteenth cen-
tury lost itself in the nonessential. It abandoned man’s nat-
ural quest for a concept of the world, and instead developed
the science of the history of philosophy. It developed a

Gunsbach and Journeys Abroad 201

worldview based on history and the natural sciences. This
view was, however, without vigor and incapable of sus-
taining a strong civilization.

Just at the time when the philosophy of civilization lost
its power, it was threatened by another danger. The ma-
chine age created living conditions that made it difficult for
civilization to progress. And because men had no ethical
concept of the world, civilization declined.

Overburdened with work, modern man has lost his ability
to concentrate, has lost his spirituality in all spheres.
The false interpretation of events in history and real life
leads to a nationalism in which humanitarian ideals have
no place. Our thoughts must, therefore, be directed toward
a concept of the world that is inspired by the ideals of
true civilization. If we begin to reflect at all on ethics
and our spiritual relationship to the universe, we are al-
ready on the road leading back from the uncivilized to
civilization.

Civilization I define in quite general terms as spiritual and ,
material progress in all spheres of life, accompanied by the j
ethical development of individuals and of mankind. /

In my book Civilization and Ethics, I describe the tragic
struggle of European thought to attain an ethical concept
of the world and life. I would have liked to include the
struggle toward a philosophy of civilization as it has de-
veloped in the world religions. But I had to abandon this
plan because it would have made the book too long. I
therefore limited myself to a few brief allusions to the sub-
ject.

202 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

I intentionally avoided technical philosophical terminol-
ogy. I wanted to appeal to thinking men and women and
to provoke them into basic thought about the questions of
existence that are in the minds of every human being.

What is it that takes place in the vain struggle toward a
deep ethical affirmation of life and the world? Socrates made
a great effort to represent the -ethical as the reasonable and
to understand the world and life affirmation as having some
meaning. But by an inexorable logic this led to resignation. V r
The ideal of Stoic philosophy is the wise man who retires
from this world.

It is only in the later Stoicism of Marcus Aurelius, Ep-
ictetus, Seneca, and others that a confident ethical concept
develops that imposes on the individual the duty to work
in the world to create better material and spiritual condi-
tions and to cultivate humanitarian ideals.

This late Stoic view of the world is to a certain extent
the forerunner of what in the eighteenth century was ac-
cepted as “conforming to reason.” When it first appears
on the stage of history it does not yet have the strength
to establish its position or to release its reforming pow-
ers. It is true the great Stoic rulers are devoted to it,
and under its influence they attempt to arrest the deca-
dence of the ancient world, which began in late antiquity.
Their vision, however, never gained any influence over
the masses.

How do the late Stoicism and the rationalism of the eigh-
teenth century lead to an ethical affirmation of the world?

Not by accepting the world as it is, but by conceiving the
course of world events as the expression of a rational, ethical
world will. The world-accepting ethical will of man inter-
prets the forces that are active in the course of history

Giinsbach and Journeys Abroad 203

according to his own common sense. Instead of offering an
objective concept of the world, this attitude projects ethical
impulses.

This process is repeated wherever philosophy comes to
an ethical acceptance of the world. It deduces this principle
from an interpretation of the course of world history that
seeks to make this course intelligible, as having meaning
and being in some way or other directed to ethical ends.
Humans, through their own ethical actions, can now serve
the overall purpose of the universe.

In Cong-tse and Zarathustra the ethical affirmation of life
is supported by a worldview founded on the same hypoth-
esis.

Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and the other great thinkers of
speculative philosophy were not satisfied with the simple
and naive theories of moral rationalism of the eighteenth
century. They arrived at their conclusions through more
complicated operations of thought. They stated that the
ethical affirmative view of life can only be reached through
a correct theory of knowledge, or the logical comprehension
of the original “Being” within the context of wpyld evenjs
in space and time. NjjV o Uqiuanr

In the artificial complexity of the great systems, the ed-
ucated minds of the early nineteenth century assumed that
they had proof that the ethic of life affirmation was the
logical result of rational thought. Their joy, however, was
of short duration. Around the middle of the century these
logical castles in the air crumbled and collapsed under the
pressure of a realistic and scie ntific method of thinking. A
period of severe disenchantment set in. Reason gave up all
its attempts to make this world comprehensible either by
manipulation or by force. It was ready to resign itself and
come to terms with reality as it is, drawing from it motives
for action that are consonant with an ethical acceptance of
the world. But it soon learned from experience that reality

204 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

refuses to provide what is expected of it. Reason alone
I cannot provide an interpretation of the world that assigns
la course of ethical action for man.

Reason could not immediately understand its limita-
tions. It was, however, evident that from that moment on
the old ethical ideals had lost their vitality. Any attempt
that reason might have made to restore the old positions
through rational interpretation of the world were doomed
to fail.

The philosophy of Reverence for Life takes the world as
it is. And the world means the horrible in the glorious, the
meaningless in the fullness of meaning, the sorrowful in
the joyful. Whatever our own point of view the world will
remain for us an enigma.

But that does not mean that we need stand before
the problem of life at our wits’ end, because we have to
renounce all hope of seeing the course of world events as
having any meaning. Reverence for Life leads us into
a spiritual relationship with the world independent of
a full understanding of the universe. Through the dark
valley of resignation it takes us by an inward necessity
up to the shining heights of ethical acceptance of the
world.

We are no longer obliged to derive our ethical world-
view from knowledge of the universe. In the principle of
Reverence for Life we possess a concept of the world
founded on itself. It renews itself in us every time we re-
flect thoughtfully about ourselves and our relation to life
around us. It is not through knowledge, but through ex-
perience of the world that we are brought into relationship
with it.

All thinking that penetrates to the bottom arrives at
ethical mysticism. What is rational reaches eventually the
nonrational. The ethical mysticism of Reverence for Life is
rational thought that derives its power from the spiritual
nature of our being.

Cunsbach and Journeys Abroad 205

While I was still correcting the proofs of Civilization and
Ethics, I had already begun packing the cases for my second
voyage to Africa.

In the autumn of 1923 the printing was interrupted for
a time because the print shop belonging to the publisher
of the German edition, which was located in Nordlingen
(Bavaria), was requisitioned by the state to help in the
production of the paper money needed during the inflation.

That I was able to take up my work in the jungle again
I owed to friends in Alsace, Switzerland, Sweden, Den-
mark, England, and Czechoslovakia, who had decided to
help me financially after they had heard my lectures.

Before leaving for Africa I also prepared for publication
the lectures I had delivered at Selly Oak College in Bir-
mingham on “Christianity and the Religions of the World.”
In the lectures I try to define the nature of religions from
the philosophic standpoint and to analyze the role that the
affirmation as well as the negation of life and ethics play in
them.

Unfortunately I did not have enough time to synthesize
my research on world religions, and I therefore had to
publish the lectures just as I had delivered them.

In the haste of packing, I also quietly wrote my childhood
recollections owing to a visit to my friend Dr. O. Pfister,
the well-known Zurich psychoanalyst. Early in the summer
of 1923, while traveling across Switzerland from west to
east, I had a two-hour wait in Zurich and went to visit him.
He offered me refreshment and gave me an opportunity to
stretch out and rest. Then he asked me to narrate some
incidents of my childhood just as they came into my mind.
He wanted to use them for a young people s magazine.
Soon afterward he sent me a copy of what he had taken

206 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

down in shorthand during those two hours. I asked him
not to publish it, but to leave it to me to complete. Then,
one Sunday afternoon shortly before my departure for Af-
rica, when it was alternately raining and snowing, I wrote,
as an epilogue to what I had told him, some thoughts about
what used to stir me when I looked back upon my youth.
This manuscript was published under the title Aus meiner
Kindheit und Jugendzeit ( Memoirs of Childhood and
Youth).

The Second Period in
Africa, 1924-1927

On February 14, 1924, I left Stras-
bourg. My wife could not go with me
this time because of her poor health.
I have never ceased to be grateful to
her that, under these circumstances,
she made the sacrifice of consenting to
my resuming work at Lambarene. I
was accompanied by Noel Gillespie, a
young Oxford student of chemistry.
His mother had entrusted him to me
for a few months as a helper.

When we embarked at Bordeaux I
came under the suspicions of the cus-
toms officer who was inspecting trav-
elers’ baggage. I had with me four

207

208 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

potato sacks full of unanswered letters, which I meant to
answer during the voyage. He had never encountered a
traveler with so many letters, and because at that time the
transfer of French money to other countries was strictly
forbidden — a traveler was only allowed to take five thou-
sand francs with him — he could not help but suspect that
money was hidden among those letters. He therefore spent
an hour and a half examining them, one by one, until, at
the bottom of the second sack, he gave up, shaking his
head.

After a long voyage on the Dutch cargo boat Orestes ,
which gave me an opportunity to get to know the places
along the west coast, we arrived at Lambaren6 at dawn on
Saturday, April 19, the day before Easter.

All that still remained of the hospital were the small
building of corrugated iron and the hardwood skeleton
of one of the big bamboo huts. During the seven years
of my absence all the other buildings had decayed and
collapsed. The path leading from the hospital to the doc-
tor’s bungalow on the hill was so completely overgrown
with grass and creepers that I could scarcely trace its
windings.

The first job, then, was to make the minimal necessary
repairs on the rotten and leaky roofs of the bungalow and
the two hospital buildings that were still standing. Next
I reerected the fallen buildings, a job that took me sev-
eral months. This work was so exhausting that I was quite
unable to give my evenings to working over the manuscript
of The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle, begun in 1911,
as I had planned. I had brought it for the second time to
Africa.

My life during those months was lived as a doctor in

The Second Period in Africa, 1924—1927 209

the mornings and as a master builder in the afternoons.
Just as during my previous stay, there were unfortunately
no laborers, since the timber trade was flourishing again
after the war and absorbed all the labor that was to be
found.

I had therefore to accept as my helpers a few “volunteers”
who were in the hospital as companions of the patients or
as convalescents. But they worked without enthusiasm and,
indeed, tended to disappear and hide themselves on the
days when they were wanted.

One day during this first period of my second sojourn in
Africa, an older timber merchant, who was already some-
what Africanized, was passing through and joined us for
lunch. When he got up from the table he thought that he
owed me a gracious remark, so he said: “Doctor, I know
that you play the harmonium very well. I also love music,
and if I did not have to hurry in order to avoid the tornado
that is coming, I would ask you to play me one of Goethe’s
fugues.”

The number of patients kept steadily increasing, so in
both 1924 and 1925 I sent for two doctors and two nurses
from Europe.

At last, in the autumn of 1925, the hospital was rebuilt,
and I was enjoying the prospect of being able to devote my
evenings to the work on St. Paul. Then a severe famine
began. The men who cut wood for the timber trade all over
the country had neglected the cultivation of their fields. At
the same time a terrible epidemic of dysentery broke out.
These two occurrences fully occupied me and my helpers
for many months. We had to make numerous journeys in
our two motorboats, the Tak sa mycket and the Raarup
(one of them a present from Swedish, the other from Jutland

210 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

friends), to collect rice wherever we could when nothing
else was available to feed our patients.

The dysentery epidemic made clear to me the necessity
of relocating the hospital to a larger site. It could not
spread out over land belonging to the mission because
all that was at my disposal was shut in by water, swamp,
or steep hills. The buildings that could be erected there
would have been sufficient for 50 patients and those who
accompanied them, but not for the 150 whom we now had
to accommodate every night. I had, indeed, already be-
come conscious of this need during the rebuilding, but
I had hoped that the huge number of patients was only
temporary.

Now the dysentery epidemic revealed to me another
danger that threatened the hospital, because I had no iso-
lation ward for infectious diseases. Because we could not
keep the dysentery patients separated from the rest, the
contagious disease spread throughout the hospital.

We lived through terrible moments!

Another serious inconvenience was the lack of a proper
place to house mental patients. I often found myself in the
position of being unable to take in dangerous lunatics, be-
cause our only two cells were already occupied.

So with a heavy heart I reluctantly made the decision to
remove the hospital to a location three kilometers (nearly
two miles) up the river where it could be expanded as much
as was necessary. My confidence in the supporters of my
work allowed me to dare take advantage of the move to
replace the old bamboo huts with corrugated-iron build-
ings; their raffia-leaf roofs were in constant need of repair.

The Second Period in Africa, 1924-1927 211

For protecting the hospital against river floods and from
the torrents that washed down from the hills after heavy
storms, I became a modern prehistoric man and erected it
as a village of corrugated iron on piles.

The professional work in the hospital I left almost entirely
to my colleagues, Dr. Nessmann (an Alsatian), Dr. Lau-
terburg (a Swiss), and Dr. Trensz (an Alsatian who came
to relieve Dr. Nessmann). I myself for a year and a half
became overseer of the laborers who cut down the trees
on the chosen site and worked on the buildings.

I had to assume this function because of the ever-
changing squad of “volunteers” recruited from among the
companions of the patients as well as convalescents well
enough to work. They would acknowledge no authority save
that of the “old” Doctor. While I was foreman of a troop
of workmen hewing down trees, the news reached me that
the philosophy faculty of the University of Prague had con-
ferred on me an honorary doctoral degree.

As soon as the building site had been cleared, I started
preparing the land near it for cultivation. What a joy it was
to win fields from the jungle!

Year after year since then, work has been carried on with
the object of producing a Garden of Eden around the hos-
pital. Hundreds of young fruit trees, which we have grown
from seed, have already been planted. Someday there will
be so much fruit growing here that all can take what they
want, and there will be no need to steal. We have already
reached this stage with the papaya, the mango, and the oil
palms. The papayas now produce more fruit than the hos-
pital needs. There were so many mangoes and oil palms in
the woods already that, once we cut down the other trees,
they formed regular groves. As soon as they were freed

212 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

from the creepers that were strangling them and from the
giant trees that overshadowed them, they at once began to
bear fruit.

These fruit trees were, of course, not part of the virgin
forest. The mangoes had made their way into the forest
from the villages that once stood along the riverbank; the
, oil palms had sprung up from kernels that the parrots had
carried off from the trees near the villages and then had
dropped. The jungle of equatorial Africa contains no indig-
enous trees with edible fruits. The traveler whose supplies
at ygive out during his journey is doomed to starvation. It is
well known that the clumps of banana and manioc, the oil
palms, the mango trees, and much of the other vegetation
that supplies edible food are not indigenous to equatorial
Africa, but were introduced by Europeans from the West
Indian islands and other tropical countries.

Unfortunately fruit cannot be stored here on account
of the dampness and the heat. As soon as it is picked it
begins to rot. For the large number of plantains required
for feeding the patients I still have to resort to supplies
from the neighboring villages. The bananas, which I grow
with paid labor, cost me in fact much more than those
the Africans sell me from their own plantations located
conveniently near the river. The Africans, however, have
scarcely any fruit trees because they do not live perma-
nently in one place, but constantly move their villages to
some new site.

Since even bananas cannot be stored, I have also had to
keep a considerable stock of rice on hand in case there are
not enough bearing banana trees in the neighborhood.

The fact that I did not at once begin building a new
hospital, but instead rebuilt the old one, was by no means
a misfortune. It enabled us to accumulate experience that

The Second Period in Africa, 1924-1927 213

was now very useful. We had only one native worker who
stayed with us all through the rebuilding, a carpenter
named Monenzali. Without him I could not have carried
out the undertaking. During the last few months I had also
the help of a young carpenter from Switzerland.

My plan to return to Europe at the end of two years
could not be realized. I had to stay in Africa for three and
a half. In the evenings I found myself so exhausted from
the continual running around in the sun that I could not
write. My remaining energy lasted for nothing beyond reg-
ular practice on my piano with its pedal attachment. The
Mysticism of Paul the Apostle therefore remained unfin-
ished.

This second period of activity in Africa is described in
the newsletter Mitteilungen aus Lambarene. They contain
sketches written at intervals for the information of friends
of the hospital.

During my absence the work that had to be done to support
the hospital was in the hands of Reverend Hans Bauer,
D.D., at Basel, and my brother-in-law, Reverend Albert
Woytt at Oberhausbergen, near Strasbourg.

Since 1919 Mme Emmy Martin at Strasbourg had also
been closely associated with our work. In 1929 she cen-
tralized everything concerning Lambaren6 and my other
activities in the new house at Giinsbach. Without her un-
tiring help and that of other friends, the undertaking, now
so much expanded, could not have continued.

Some of the new buildings were finished, and on January
21, 1927, the patients could be transferred from the old to

214 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

the new hospital. On the evening of the last journey we
made, I took the mental patients with me. Their guardians
never tired of telling them that in the new hospital they
would live in cells with wood floors. In the old cells the
floor had been just the damp earth.

When I made my tour of the hospital that evening, there
resounded from every fire and every mosquito net the
greeting “It’s a good hut, Doctor, a very good hut!” So now
for the first time since I began to work in Africa my patients
were housed as human beings should be.

In April 1927, I was able to hand over the supervision
of the workers engaged in the clearing of the woods around
the hospital to Mrs. C. E. B. Russell. She had just arrived
from England, and she had a talent for getting the men to
follow her orders. Under her leadership a beginning was
also made in laying out a plantation. Since then I have
noticed that on the whole the authority of a white woman
is more readily recognized by the Africans than that of us
men.

Around the middle of the summer in the same year I
completed several additional wards. Now I was in posses-
sion of a hospital in which, if need be, we could accom-
modate 200 patients and those who accompanied them. In
recent months the number has been between 140 and 160.
Provision was also made for the isolation of dysentery pa-
tients. The building for the mental patients was erected
from a fund established by the Guildhouse congregation in
London in memory of a deceased member, Mr. Ambrose
Pomeroy-Cragg.

Finally, after the essential interior installations were
completed, I could depart for Europe and leave the re-
sponsibility for the hospital to my colleagues. On July 21 I

The Second Period in Africa, 1924—1927 215

left Lambarene. Miss Mathilde Kottmann, who had worked
at the hospital since 1924, and the sister of Dr. Lauterburg
traveled with me. Miss Emma Hausknecht remained at
Lambarene, and several other nurses soon joined her to
assist her in her work.

The hospital could never have existed without the assis-
tance of the volunteers who have given of themselves so
generously.

Two Years in Europe.
The Mysticism of
Paul the Apostle

Of the two years I spent in Europe a
good part was taken up with traveling
to give lectures and organ recitals. The
autumn and winter of 1927 I spent in
Sweden and Denmark. In the spring
and early summer of 1928 1 was in Hol-
land and England; in the autumn and
winter in Switzerland, Germany, and
Czechoslovakia. In 1929 I undertook
several recital tours in Germany.
When not traveling, I lived with my
wife and daughter at the mountain
health resort of Konigsfeld in the Black
Forest, or at Strasbourg.

I had many worries due to the rel-

Two Years in Europe 217

atively frequent need to replace doctors and nurses in Lam-
barene. Some could not tolerate the climate; others had
family obligations that forced them to return to Europe
sooner than they had intended. I recruited several new
people, Dr. Miindler, Dr. Hediger, Dr. Stalder, and Dr.
Schnabel, all from Switzerland. We were all much sad-
dened by the death of a Swiss doctor, Dr. Eric Dolken
who, in October 1929 on the voyage to Lambarene, died
suddenly in the harbor of Grand Bassam, probably from a
heart attack.

I dedicated all my spare time in Europe to the completion
of my book on The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle. I did not
wish to take the manuscript with me to Africa a third time,
and I soon found myself once more at home with the subject
matter. Slowly the manuscript developed, chapter by chap-
ter.

Paul’s mysticism of being-in-Christ finds its explanation in
the conception the Apostle has of the coming of the Mes-
sianic Kingdom and of the end of the world. On the strength
of the views that he, like his fellow believers in those ear-
liest days, had taken over from Judaism, he supposes that
those who believe in Jesus as the coming Messiah will live
with Him in the Messianic Kingdom in a supernatural ex-
istence, while their unbelieving contemporaries and the
people of previous generations ever since the Creation must
remain for some time in the grave. It is only at the close
of the Messianic Kingdom, which, though supernatural, is
nevertheless conceived as transitory, that, in accordance
with the late Jewish view, the General Resurrection takes
place and is followed by the Last Judgment. Not until then
does Eternity begin, in which God “is all in all,” that is,
all things return to God.

218 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

Paul explains that those who see in Jesus the Messiah
and who ascend to the Messianic Kingdom — in this way
experiencing the resurrection before other human beings —
are thus privileged because they have lived in fellowship
with Jesus. Their faith in Him makes plain that God has
chosen them to be the companions of the Messiah. By virtue
of this union with Jesus, which is both mystical and natural,
the forces that led Him to choose His death and His res-
urrection begin to work in them.

These believers cease to be natural men like others. They
become beings who are in the process of changing from a
natural to a supernatural condition. Their human appear-
ance is only a kind of veil, which they will throw off when
the Messianic Kingdom comes to pass. In a mysterious way
they are already dead and have risen with Christ and in
Him, and will soon share with Him the existence that fol-
lows His resurrection.

The mysticism involved in “being-in-Christ” and of
having “died and risen with Christ” is extended in the
eschatological expectation. The belief in the imminent
manifestation of the Kingdom leads, in Paul’s thought, to
a conviction that, with the death and resurrection of Jesus,
the change of the natural into the supernatural has already
begun. We therefore deal with a mysticism that is based
on the assumption of a great cosmic event.

Because Paul understood the significance of this union
with Christ, he wanted to put the ethic of this union into
practice. In Judaism believers had only to obey the Law,
since that is valid for natural men. For the same reason it
must not be imposed on heathen who have come to believe
in Christ. Whoever enters into union with Christ discerns
what is ethical directly from the spirit of Christ in which
he shares.

For other believers inspired words and ecstasy are the
surest proof of the living spirit, but Paul turns the doctrine
of the spirit to ethics. According to him the spirit that

Two Years in Europe 219

believers possess is the spirit of Jesus, in which they have
become participants because of the mysterious fellowship
with Him that they enjoy. This spirit of Jesus is the divine
force of life that prepares them for existence after the res-
urrection. At the same time it is the power compelling
believers, because they are different, to accept themselves
as men who have ceased to belong to this world. The highest
manifestation of the spirit is love. Love is eternal, and men
can possess it here on earth.

Thus in the eschatological mysticism of the fellowship
with Christ, everything metaphysical has an ethical signif-
icance. Paul establishes the supremacy of the ethical in
religion for all time in the saying “And now abideth faith,
hope, and love, these three, but the greatest of these is
love.” He demonstrates this ethical view of what it is to be
a Christian by his complete dedication to service.

Paul interprets the saying of Jesus about bread and wine
being His body and blood as being in accordance with his
doctrine of the mystical fellowship with Christ. He explains
the significance of the Last Supper by saying that those
who eat and drink enter into communion with Jesus. Bap-
tism, the beginning of redemption through Christ, is for
him the beginning of dying and rising again with Christ.
The doctrine of justification by faith, which has been ac-
cepted for centuries as the essential element of Paul’s
thought, is in reality a concept from the primitive doctrine
of the atoning death of Jesus, inspired by the mystical com-
munion with Jesus.

In order to meet his Jewish-Christian opponents more
successfully, Paul undertakes to formulate the belief in the
atoning significance of the sacrifice of Jesus in such a way
that this belief makes certain that the Law is no longer
valid. He also rejects — in contrast to the Jewish Chris-
tians — the significance of good works, emphasized by Jew-
ish Law, because in his mysticism he demands ethical deeds
as proof of fellowship with Christ.

220 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

The doctrine of justification by faith created in order to
combat Jewish Christianity has acquired great importance.
Since that time those who rebelled against the concept of
a Christianity justified by good works could appeal to the
doctrine of the Apostle and win their case on his authority.

On the other hand the artificial logic Paul uses in his
attempt to represent this doctrine as contained in the Old
Testament has given rise to an erroneous criticism of him.
He is accused of being the man who invented a complicated
dogma to replace the simple Gospel of Jesus. In reality,
however, Paul, in spite of rabbinic elements that show up
here and there in his argument, is a powerful thinker who
arrives at elemental truths.

He puts forward the simple Gospel of Jesus, not in the
letter, but in the spirit. By raising the eschatological belief
in Jesus and the Kingdom of God to the mysticism of fel-
lowship with Christ, Paul has endowed it with a force that
enables it to outlast the decline of the eschatological ex-
pectation and to be recognized by and integrated into var-
ious systems of thought as an ethical Christ-mysticism. In
fact, he develops his eschatological faith to its last conse-
quences, and he arrives at thoughts about our relation to
Jesus that, because of their spiritual and ethical significance
are definite and timeless, in spite of the fact that they
originated from the metaphysics of eschatology.

There is, then, no Greek element in Paul. He does,
however, give the Christian faith a form that can be assim-
ilated by the Greek spirit. Ignatius and Justin, in whose
thought this process is completed, translate the mysticism
of fellowship with Christ into Greek concepts.

I wrote the last chapter of The Mysticism of Paul the
Apostle in December 1929, on board ship between Bor-
deaux and Cape Lopez. The introduction was written the
day after Christmas on board the river steamer that took

Two Years in Europe 221

us — my wife and myself, Dr. Anna Schmitz, and Miss
Marie Secretan, who came to work in the laboratory — to
Lambarene.

On this third arrival I unfortunately again found that
construction work had to be done. During a serious epi-
demic of dysentery, which was coming to an end just as I
arrived, the wards of the unit had proved to be too small.
As a result, the neighboring building for mental patients
had to be turned over to those suffering from dysentery,
and a new one had to be erected for the mental patients.
Based on the experiences accumulated in the meantime,
the new buildings were made stronger and at the same
time lighter and more airy than the old ones.

After that I had to build a large barrack with separate
beds for severe cases, an airy and theft-proof storeroom for
food supplies, and rooms for the African hospital orderlies.

With the help of Monenzali, our loyal carpenter, all this
work was done in a year, while I carried on my duties in
the hospital. At the same time a young Alsatian forester
who spent his vacation in the Ogowe offered his competent
help. He built a large cement reservoir for rainwater and
an airy building of the same material, which serves us as
dining room and common room.

Toward Easter, 1930, my wife, exhausted by the climate,
unfortunately had to return to Europe. In the course of the
summer a new Alsatian physician, Dr. Meylander, arrived.

The hospital is now known over an area of hundreds of
kilometers. People come to us for operations who must
spend weeks on the journey.

Through the generosity of friends in Europe we were
able to build an operating room that is outfitted with every-
thing necessary. We now can store in the pharmacy all the
medications we require, even the expensive ones needed

222 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

for the treatment of tropical diseases. Further, it makes it
possible for us to feed the many sick people who are too
poor to buy their own food.

To work at Lambarene is now a pleasure, the more so
because we have enough doctors and nurses to do all that
is needed without our having to work ourselves to the point
of exhaustion. How can we thank the friends of the hospital
who have made such work possible!

While work at the hospital is still demanding, it is not,
as it once was, beyond our strength. In the evening I am
fresh enough to turn to intellectual labor, although this
leisure-time work is often still interrupted for days or even
weeks at a time when I become preoccupied with surgical
and serious medical cases and can think about nothing else.
For this reason this simple narrative of my life and work,
which I had planned as my first literary work during this
present stay in Africa, is taking me many months to com-
plete.

Epilogue

Two observations have cast their shad-
ows over my life. One is the realization
that the world is inexplicably myste-
rious and full of suffering, the other
that I have been born in a period of
spiritual decline for mankind.

I myself found the basis and the di-
rection for my life at the moment I
discovered the principle of Reverence
for Life, which contains life’s ethical
affirmation. I therefore want to work
in this world to help people to think
more deeply and more independently.
I am in complete disagreement with
the spirit of our age, because it is filled

223

224 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

with contempt for thought. We have come to doubt
whether thinking will ever be capable of answering ques-
tions about the universe and our relationship to it in a way
that would give meaning and substance to our lives.

Today, in addition to that neglect of thought, there is
also a mistrust of it. The organized political, social, and
religious associations of our time are at work convincing
the individual not to develop his convictions through his
own thinking but to assimilate the ideas they present to
him. Any man who thinks for himself is to them inconve-
nient and even ominous. He does not offer sufficient guar-
antee that he will merge into the organization.

Corporate bodies do not look for their strength in ideas
and in the values of the people for whom they are respon-
sible. They try to achieve the greatest possible uniformity.
They believe that in this way they hold the greatest power,
offensive as well as defensive.

Hence the spirit of the age, instead of deploring the fact
that thought seems to be unequal to its task, rejoices in it
and gives it no credit for what, in spite of its imperfections,
it has already accomplished. Against all the evidence it
refuses to admit that human progress up until today has
come about through the efforts of thought. It will not rec-
ognize that thought may in the future accomplish what it
has not yet achieved. The spirit of the age ignores such
considerations. Its only concern is to discredit individual
thought in every possible way.

Man today is exposed throughout his life to influences
that try to rob him of all confidence in his own thinking.
He lives in an atmosphere of intellectual dependence,
which surrounds him and manifests itself in everything he
hears or reads. It is in the people whom he meets every

Epilogue 225

day; it is in the political parties and associations that have
claimed him as their own; it pervades all the circumstances
of his life.

From every side and in the most varied ways it is ham-
mered into him that the truths and convictions that he
needs for life must be taken away from the associations that
have rights over him. The spirit of the age never lets him
find himself. Over and over again, convictions are forced
upon him just as he is exposed, in big cities, to glaring
neon signs of companies that are rich enough to install them
and enjoin him at every step to give preference to one or
another shoe polish or soup mix.

By the spirit of the age, then, the man of today is forced
into skepticism about his own thinking, so that he may
become receptive to what he receives from authority. He
cannot resist this influence because he is overworked, dis-
tracted, and incapable of concentrating. Moreover, the ma-
terial dependence that is his lot has an effect on his mind,
so he finally believes that he is not qualified to come to his
own conclusions.

His self-confidence is also affected by the prodigious de-
velopments in knowledge. He cannot comprehend or as-
similate the new discoveries. He is forced to accept them
as givens, although he does not understand them. As a
result of this attitude toward scientific truth he begins to
doubt his own judgment in other spheres of thought.

Thus the circumstances of the age do their best to deliver
us to the spirit of the age. The seed of skepticism has
germinated. In fact, modem man no longer has any con-
fidence in himself. Behind a self-assured exterior he con-
^cBsds an inner lack of confidence. In spite of his great
technological achievements and material possessions, he is

226 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

an altogether stunted being, because he makes no use of
his capacity for thinking. It will always remain incompre-
hensible that our generation, which has shown itself so great
by its discoveries and inventions, could fall so low in the
realm of thought.

In a period that ridicules as antiquated and without value
whatever seems akin to rational or independent thought,
and which even mocks the inalienable human rights pro-
claimed in the eighteenth century, I declare myself to be
one who places all his confidence in rational thinking. I
venture to tell our generation that it is not at the end of
rationalism just because past rationalism first gave way to
romanticism and later to a pretended realism that reigned
in intellectual as well as in material life. When we have
passed through all the follies of the so-called universal real-
politik, and because of it suffered spiritual misery, there
will be no other choice but to turn to a new rationalism
more profound and more effective than that of the past. To
renounce thinking is to declare mental bankruptcy.

When we give up the conviction that we can arrive at
s the truth through thinking, skepticism appears. Those who
Y work toward greater skepticism in our age expect that by
denouncing all hope of self-discovered truth, men will come
to accept as true whatever is forced upon them by authority
and by propaganda.

But their calculations are mistaken. Whoever opens the
sluices to let a flood of skepticism pour over the land cannot
assume that later he can stem the flood. Only a few of those
who give up the search for truth will be so docile as to
submit once and for all to official doctrine. The mass of

Epilogue 227

people will remain skeptical. They lose all desire for truth,
finding themselves quite comfortable in a life without
thought, driven now here, now there, from one opinion to
another.

But merely accepting authoritarian truth, even if that
truth has some virtue, does not bring skepticism to an end.
To blindly accept a truth one has never reflected upon
retards the advance of reason. Our world rots in deceit.
Our very attempt to manipulate truth itself brings us to the
brink of disaster.

Truth based on a skepticism that has become belief has ^
not the spiritual qualities of truth that originated in thought.

It is superficial and inflexible. It exerts an influence over
man, but it cannot reach his inner being. Living truth is
only that which has its origin in thought. ^

Just as a tree bears the same fruit year after year and at
the same time fruit that is new each year, so must all per-
manently valuable ideas be continually created anew in
thought. But our age pretends to make a sterile tree bear
fruit by tying fruits of truth onto its branches.

Only when we gain the confidence that we can find
the truth through our own individual thought will we
be able to arrive at living truth. Independent thought,
provided it is profound, never degenerates into subjec-
tivity. What is true in our tradition will be brought to
light through deep thought, and it can become the force
of reason in us. The will to sincerity must be as strong as
the will to truth. Only an age that has the courage of con-
viction can possess truth that works as a force of spirit and
of reason.

Sincerity is the foundation of the life of mind and spirit.
With its disdain for thinking, our generation has lost its

228 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

feeling for sincerity. It can therefore be helped only by
reviving the voice of thought.

Because I have this certainty, I oppose the spirit of the age
and accept with confidence the responsibility for contrib-
uting to the rekindling of the fire of thought.

The concept of Reverence for Life is by its very nature
especially well qualified to take up the struggle against
skepticism. It is elemental.

/ Elemental thinking starts from fundamental questions
about the relationship of man to the universe, about the
meaning of life, and about the nature of what is good. It is
( directly linked to the thought that motivates all people. It
I penetrates our thought, enlarges and deepens it, and makes
! it more profound.

We find such elemental thinking i n Stoicism. When as
a student I began to study the history of philosophy, I found
it difficult to tear myself away from Stoicism and to make
my way through the utterly different thinking that suc-
ceeded it. It is true that the results of Stoic thought did
not satisfy me, but I had the feeling that this simple kind
of philosophizing was the right one. I could not understand
how people had come to abandon it.

Stoicism seemed to me great in that it goes straight for
its goal, is universally intelligible and at the same time
profound. It makes the best of what it recognizes as truth,
even if it is not completely satisfying. It puts life into that
truth by seriously devoting itself to it. It possesses the spirit
of sincerity and urges men to gather their thoughts and to
become more inward. It arouses in them a sense of re-
sponsibility. It also seemed to me that the fundamental

Epilogue 229

tenet of Stoicism is correct, namely that man must bring
himself into a spiritual relation with the world and become
one with it. In its essence, Stoicism is a natural philosophy
that ends in mysticism.

Just as I felt Stoicism to be elemental, so I felt that the
thought of Lao-tse was the same when I became acquainted
with his Tao-te-king. For him, too, it is important that man
come, by simple thought, into a spiritual relation with the
world and prove his unity with it by his life.

There is, therefore, an essential relationship between
Greek Stoicism and Chinese philosophy. The difference
between them is that the first had its origin in well-
developed, logical thinking, the second in intuitive thinking
that was undeveloped yet marvelously profound.

This elemental thinking, however, which emerges in Eu-
ropean as in Far Eastern philosophy, has not been able to
maintain the position of leadership that it should occupy
within systems of thought. It is unsuccessful because its
conclusions do not satisfy our needs.

Stoic thought neglects the impulse that leads to ethical
acts that manifest themselves in the will to live as it evolved
with the intellectual and spiritual development of man.
Hence Greek Stoicism goes no further than the ideal of
resignation, Lao-tse no further than the benign passivity
that to us Europeans seems so curious and paradoxical.

The history of philosophy documents that the thoughts
of ethical affirmation of life, which are natural to man, can-
not be content with the results of simple logical thinking
about man and his relationship to the universe. They cannot
integrate themselves. Logical thought is forced to take de-
tours via which it hopes to arrive at its goal. The detours
logic has to take lead primarily to an interpretation of the

230 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

universe in which ethical action has meaning and purpose.

In the late Stoicism of Epictetus, of Marcus Aurelius,
and of Seneca, in the rationalism of the eighteenth century,
and in that of Cong-tse (Confucius), Meng-tse (Mencius),
Mi-tse (Micius), and other Chinese thinkers, philosophy
starts from the fundamental problem of the relationship
of man to the universe and reaches an ethical affirmation of
life and of the world. This philosophy traces the course of
world events back to a world will with ethical aims, and
. claims man for service to it.

In the thinking of Brahmanism and of the Buddha, in
the Indian systems generally, and in the philosophy of Scho-
penhauer, the opposite explanation of the world is put for-
ward, namely that the life that runs its course in space and
time is purposeless and must be brought to an end. The
sensible attitude of man to the world is therefore to re-
nounce the world and life.

Side by side with the kind of thought that is concerned
with elemental issues, another kind has emerged, especially
in European philosophy. I call it “secondary” because it
does not focus on the relationship between man and the
universe. It is concerned with the problem of the nature
of knowledge, with logical speculation, with natural sci-
ence, with psychology, with sociology, and with other
1 things, as if philosophy were really concerned with the
answers to all these questions for their own sake, or as if
it consisted merely in sifting and systematizing the results
of the various sciences. Instead of urging man toward con-
stant meditation about himself and his relationship to the
world, this philosophy presents him with the results of
^epistemology, of logical deduction, of natural science, of
psychology, or of sociology, as if it could, with the help

Epilogue 231

of these disciplines, arrive at a concept of his relation
with the universe.

On all these issues this “secondary” philosophy dis-
courses with him as if he were, not a being who is in the
world and lives his life in it, but one who is stationed near
it and contemplates it from the outside.

Because it approaches the problem of the relationship of
man to the universe from some arbitrarily chosen stand-
point, or perhaps bypasses it altogether, this nonelemental
European philosophy lacks unity and cohesion. It appears
more or less restless, artificial, eccentric, and fragmentary.

At the same time, it is the richest and most universal. In
its systems, half-systems, and nonsystems, which succeed
and interpenetrate each other, it is able to contemplate the \
problem of a philosophy of civilization from every side and |
every possible perspective. It is also the most practical in !
that it deals with the natural sciences, history, and ethical
questions more profoundly than the others do.

The world philosophy of the future will not result in
efforts to reconcile European and non-European thought
but rather in the confrontation between elemental and
nonelemental thinking. ^

Mysticism is not part of intellectual life today. By its
nature, it is a kind of elemental thought that attempts to
establish a spiritual relationship between man and the uni-
verse. Mysticism does not believe that logical reasoning
can achieve this unity, and it therefore retreats into intu-
ition, where imagination has free rein. In a certain sense,
then, mysticism goes back to a mode of thinking that takes
roundabout routes.

Since we only accept knowledge that is based on truth
attained through logical reasoning, the convictions on which

232 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

mysticism is founded cannot become our own. Moreover,

| they are not satisfying in themselves. Of all the mysticism
of the past it must be said that its ethical content is slight.
It puts men on the road of inwardness, but not on that of
a viable ethic. The truth of philosophy is not proved until
it has led us to experience the relationship between our
being and that of the universe, an experience that makes
us genuine human beings, guided by an active ethic.

Against the spiritual void of our age, neither nonele-
mental thought with its long-winded interpretations of the
world nor the intuition of mysticism can do anything ef-
fective.

The great German philosophical systems of the early
nineteenth century were greeted with enthusiasm, yet they
prepared the ground on which skepticism developed.

In order to become thinking beings again, people must
rediscover their ability to think, so they can attain the
knowledge and wisdom they need to truly live. The think-
ing that starts from Reverence for Life is a renewal of el-
emental thinking. The stream that has been flowing for a
long distance underground resurfaces again.

The belief that elemental thought can lead us today to an
affirmative ethic of life and the world, for which it has
searched in the past in vain, is no illusion.

The world does not consist of phenomena only; it is also
alive. I must establish a relationship with my life in this
world, insofar as it is within my reach, one that is not only
passive but active. In dedicating myself to the service of
whatever lives, I find an activity that has meaning and
purpose.

Epilogue 233

The idea of Reverence for Life offers itself as the realistic
answer to the realistic question of how man and the universe
are related to each other. Of the universe, man knows only
that everything that exists is, like himself, a manifestation
of the will to live. With this universe, he stands in both a
passive and an active relationship. On the one hand he is
subject to the flow of world events; on the other hand he
is able to preserve and build, or to injure and destroy, the
life that surrounds him.

The only possible way of giving meaning to his existence
is to raise his physical relationship to the world to a spiritual
one. If he remains a passive being, through resignation he
enters into a spiritual relationship with the world. True
resignation consists in this: that man, feeling his subordi-
nation to the course of world events, makes his way toward
inward freedom from the fate that shapes his external ex-
istence. Inward freedom gives him the strength to triumph
over the difficulties of everyday life and to become a deeper
and more inward person, calm and peaceful. Resignation,
therefore, is the spiritual and ethical affirmation of one s
own existence. Only he who has gone through the trial of
resignation is capable of accepting the world.

By playing an active role, man enters into a spiritual
relationship with this world that is quite different: he does
not see his existence in isolation. On the contrary, he is
united with the lives that surround him; he experiences
the destinies of others as his own. He helps as much as he
can and realizes that there is no greater happiness than to
participate in the development and protection of life.

Once man begins to think about the mystery of his life
and the finks connecting him with the life that fills the
world, he cannot but accept, for his own life and all other

234 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

life that surrounds him, the principle of Reverence for Life.
He will act according to this principle of the ethical affir-
mation of life in everything he does. His life will become
in every respect more difficult than if he lived for himself,
but at the same time it will be richer, more beautiful, and
happier. It will become, instead of mere living, a genuine
experience of life.

Beginning to think about life and the world leads us
directly and almost irresistibly to Reverence for Life. No
other conclusions make any sense.

If the man who has begun to think wishes to persist in
merely vegetating, he can do so only by submitting to a
life devoid of thought. If he perseveres in his thinking he
will arrive at Reverence for Life.

Any thought that claims to lead to skepticism or life with-
out ethical ideals is not genuine thought but thoughtless-
ness disguised as thinking. This is manifested by the
absence of any interest in the mystery of life and the world.

Reverence for Life in itself contains resignation, an affirm-
ative attitude toward the world, and ethics. These are the
three essential and inseparable elements of a worldview
that is the result (or fruit) of thinking.

Because it has its origin in realistic thinking, the ethic
of Reverence for Life is realistic, and leads man to a realistic
and clear confrontation with reality.

It may look, at first glance, as if Reverence for Life were
something too general and too lifeless to provide the con-
tent for a living ethic. But thinking need not worry about
whether its expressions sound lively, so long as they hit
the mark and have life in them. Anyone who comes under

Epilogue 235

the influence of the ethic of Reverence for Life will very
soon be able to detect, thanks to what that ethic demands
from him, the fire that glows in the seemingly abstract
expression. The ethic of Reverence for Life is the ethic of
love widened into universality. It is the ethic of Jesus, now
recognized as a logical consequence of thought.

Some object that this ethic sets too high a value on natural
life. To this one can respond that the mistake made by all
previous ethical systems has been the failure to recognize
that life as such is the mysterious value with which they
have to deal. Reverence for Life, therefore, is applied to
natural life and the life of the mind alike. In the parable of
Jesus, the shepherd saves not merely the soul of the lost
sheep but the whole animal. The stronger the reverence
for natural life, the stronger also that for spiritual life.

The ethic of Reverence for Life is judged particularly
strange because it establishes no dividing line between
higher and lower, between more valuable and less valuable
life. It has its reasons for this omission.

To undertake to establish universally valid distinctions
of value between different kinds of life will end in judging
them by the greater or lesser distance at which they stand
from us human beings. Our own judgment is, however, a
purely subjective criterion. Who among us knows what
significance any other kind of life has in itself, as a part of
the universe?

From this distinction comes the view that there can be
life that is worthless, which can be willfully destroyed. Then
in the category of worthless life we may classify various
kinds of insects, or primitive peoples, according to circum-
stances.

To the person who is truly ethical all life is sacred, in-

236 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

eluding that which from the human point of view seems
lower. Man makes distinctions only as each case comes
before him, and under the pressure of necessity, as, for
example, when it falls to him to decide which of two lives
he must sacrifice in order to preserve the other. But all
through this series of decisions he is conscious of acting on
subjective grounds and arbitrarily, and knows that he bears
the responsibility for the life that is sacrificed.

I rejoice over the new remedies for sleeping sickness,
which enable me to preserve life, where once I could only
witness the progress of a painful disease. But every time I
put the germs that cause the disease under the microscope
I cannot but reflect that I have to sacrifice this life in order
to save another.

I bought from some villagers a young osprey they had
caught on a sandbank, in order to rescue it from their cruel
hands. But then I had to decide whether I should let it
starve, or kill a number of small fishes every day in order
to keep it alive. I decided on the latter course, but every
day the responsibility to sacrifice one life for another caused
me pain.

Standing, as all living beings are, before this dilemma of
the will to live, man is constantly forced to preserve his
own life and life in general only at the cost of other life. If
he has been touched by the ethic of Reverence for Life,
he injures and destroys life only under a necessity he cannot
avoid, and never from thoughtlessness.

Devoted as I was from boyhood to the cause of protecting
animal life, it is a special joy to me that the universal ethic
of Reverence for Life shows such sympathy with animals —
so often represented as sentimentality — to be an obligation
no thinking person can escape. Past ethics faced the prob-

Epilogue 237

lem of the relationship between man and animal either
without sensitivity or as being incomprehensible. Even
when there was sympathy with animal creation, it could
not be brought within the scope of ethics because ethics
focused solely on the behavior of man to man.

Will the time ever come when public opinion will no
longer tolerate popular amusements that depend on the
maltreatment of animals!

The ethic, then, that originates in thinking is not “ra-
tional,” but ir+ational and enthusiastic. It does not draw a
circle of well-defined tasks around me, but charges each
individual with responsibility for all life within his reach
and forces him to devote himself to helping that life.

Any profound view of the universe is mystic in that it brings
men into a spiritual relationship with the Infinite. The con-
cept of Reverence for Life is ethical mysticism. It allows
union with the Infinite to be realized by ethical action. This
ethical mysticism originates in logical thinking. If our will
to live begins to meditate about itself and the universe, we
will become sensitive to life around us and will then, insofar
as it is possible, dedicate through our actions our own will
to live to that of the infinite will to live. Rational thinking,
if it goes deep, ends of necessity in the irrational realm of
mysticism. It has, of course, to deal with life and the world,
both of which are nonrational entities.

In the universe the infinite will to live reveals itself to
us as will to create, and this is filled with dark and painful
riddles for us. It manifests itself in us as the will to love,
which resolves the riddles through our actions. The concept
of Reverence for Life therefore has a religious character.

238 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

The person who adopts and acts upon this belief is moti-
vated by a piety that is elemental.

With its active ethic of love, and through its spirituality,
the concept of the world that is based on respect for life is
in essence related to Christianity and to all religions that
profess the ethic of love. Now we can establish a lively
relationship between Christianity and thought that we
never before had in our spiritual life.

In the eighteenth century Christianity in the time of
rationalism entered into an alliance with thought. It was
able to do so because at that time it encountered an en-
thusiastic ethic that was religious in character. Thought
itself had not produced this ethic, however, but had un-
wittingly taken it over from Christianity. When, later on,
it had to depend solely upon its own ethic, this proved to
have so little life and so little religion that it had not much
in common with Christian ethics. As a consequence, the
bonds between Christianity and active thought were loos-
ened. Today Christianity has withdrawn into itself and is
occupied with the propagation of its own ideas. It no longer
considers it important to keep ideas in agreement with
thought, but prefers to regard them as something altogether
outside of, and superior to, rational thought. Christianity
thereby loses its connection with the elemental spirit of the
times and the possibility of exercising any real influence
over it.

The philosophy of Reverence for Life once again poses
the question of whether Christianity will or will not join
hands with a form of thought that is both ethical and reli-
gious in character.

Epilogue 239

To become aware of its real self, Christianity needs
thought. For centuries it treasured the great command-
ments of love and mercy as traditional truths without op-
posing slavery, witch burning, torture, and all the other
ancient and medieval forms of inhumanity committed in its
name. Only when it experienced the influence of the think-
ing of the Enlightenment was Christianity stirred up to
enter the struggle for humanitarian principles. This re-
membrance ought to keep it forever from assuming any air
of arrogance vis-a-vis thought.

Many people find pleasure today in recalling how “su-
perficial” Christianity became in the Enlightenment. It is,
however, only fair to acknowledge to what degree this “su-
perficial” character was balanced by the services Christi-
anity rendered in this period.

Today torture has been reestablished. In many countries
the system of justice quietly tolerates torture being applied
before and simultaneously with the regular proceedings of
police and prison officials in order to extract confessions
from those accused. The amount of suffering thus caused
every hour surpasses imagination. To this renewal of torture
Christianity today offers no opposition even in words, much
less in deeds.

Because Christianity hardly acts on its spiritual or ethical
principles, it deceives itself with the delusion that its po-
sition as a Church becomes stronger every year. It is ac-
commodating itself to the spirit of the age by adopting a
kind of modern worldliness. Like other organized bodies
it tries to prove itself by becoming an ever stronger and
more uniform organization, justified and recognized
through its role in history and its institutions. But as it gains
in external power, it loses in spiritual power.

240 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

Christianity cannot take the place of thinking, but it must
be founded on it. In and by itself it is not capable of over-
coming thoughtlessness and skepticism. Only an age that
draws its strength from thought and from an elemental piety
can recognize the imperishable character of Christianity.

Just as a stream is kept from gradually drying up because
it flows along above underground water, so Christianity
needs the underground water of elemental piety that issues
from thinking. It can only attain real spiritual power when
men no longer find the road from thought to religion barred.

I know that I myself owe it to thought that I was able to
retain my faith in religion.

The thinking person stands up more freely in the face of
traditional religious truth than the nonthinking person and
feels the intrinsic, profound, and imperishable elements
much more strongly.

Anyone who has recognized that the idea of love is the
spiritual ray of light that reaches us from the infinite ceases
to demand from religion that it offer him complete knowl-
edge of the metaphysical. He ponders, indeed, the great
questions: What is the meaning of evil in the world? How
in God, the source of being, are the will to create and the
will to love one? In what relation do the spiritual life and
the material life stand to one another? And in what way is
our existence transitory and yet eternal? But he is able to
leave these questions unanswered, however painful that
may be. In the knowledge of his spiritual union with God
through love he possesses all that is necessary.

“Love never faileth: but whether there be knowledge it
shall be done away,” says Paul.

The deeper is piety, the humbler are its claims with
regard to knowledge of the metaphysical. It is like a path

Epilogue 241

that winds between the hills instead of running over them.

The fear that a Christianity that sees the origin of piety
in thought will sink into pantheism is without foundation.
All living Christianity is pantheistic, since it regards every-
thing that exists as having its origin in the source of all
being. But at the same time all ethical piety is superior to
any pantheistic mysticism, in that it does not find the God
of love in nature, but knows about Him only from the fact
that He announces Himself in us as the will to love. The
First Cause of Being, as He manifests Himself in nature,
is to us always impersonal. To the First Cause of Being that
is revealed to us in the will to love, however, we relate as
to an ethical personality.

The belief that the Christianity that has been influenced
by rational thought has lost its ability to appeal to man’s
conscience, to his sinfulness, is unfounded. We cannot see
that sin has diminished where it has been much talked
about. There is not much about it in the Sermon on the
Mount. But thanks to the longing for deliverance from sin
and for purity of heart that Jesus has included in the Bea-
titudes, these form the great call to repentance that is un-
ceasingly working on man.

If Christianity, for the sake of any tradition or for any
considerations whatever, refuses to let itself be interpreted
in terms of ethical religious thinking, it will be a misfortune
for itself and for mankind. Christianity needs to be filled
with the spirit of Jesus, and in the strength of that shall
spiritualize itself into the living religion of inwardness and
love that is its destiny. Only then can it become the leaven
in the spiritual life of mankind.

What has been presented as Christianity during these
nineteen centuries is merely a beginning, full of mistakes.

242 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

not a full-grown Christianity springing from the spirit of
Jesus.

Because I am deeply devoted to Christianity, I am trying
to serve it with loyalty and sincerity. I do not attempt to
defend it with the fragile and ambiguous arguments of
Christian apologetics. I demand from Christianity that it
reform itself in the spirit of sincerity and with thoughtful-
ness, so it may become conscious of its true nature.

To the question of whether I am a pessimist or an optimist,
I answer that my knowledge is pessimistic, but my willing
and hoping are optimistic.

I am pessimistic because I feel the full weight of what
we conceive to be the absence of purpose in the course of
world events. Only at rare moments have I felt really glad
to be alive. I cannot help but feel the suffering all around
me, not only of humanity but of the whole of creation.

I have never tried to withdraw myself from this com-
munity of suffering. It seemed to me a matter of course
that we should all take our share of the burden of pain that
lies upon the world. Even while I was a boy at school it
was clear to me that no explanation of the evil in the world
could ever satisfy me; all explanations, I felt, ended in
sophistries, and at bottom had no other object than to min-
imize our sensitivity to the misery around us. That a thinker
like Leibnitz could reach the miserable conclusion that
though this world is, indeed, not good, it is the best that
is possible, I have never been able to understand.

But however concerned I was with the suffering in the
world, I never let myself become lost in brooding over it.
I always held firmly to the thought that each one of us can

Epilogue 243

do a little to bring some portion of it to an end. Thus I
gradually came to the conclusion that all we can understand
about the problem is that we must follow our own way as
those who want to bring about deliverance.

I am also pessimistic about the current world situa-
tion. I cannot persuade myself that it is better than it
appears to be. I feel that we are on a fatal road, that if we
continue to follow it, it will bring us into a new “Dark
Ages.” I see before me, in all its dimensions, the spiritual
and material misery to which mankind has surrendered
because it has renounced thinking and the ideals that
thought engenders.

And yet I remain optimistic. One belief from my child-
hood I have preserved with a certainty I can never lose:
belief in truth. I am confident that the spirit generated by
truth is stronger than the force of circumstances. In my
view no other destiny awaits mankind than that which,
through its mental and spiritual disposition, it prepares for
itself. Therefore I do not believe that it will have to tread
the road to ruin right to the end.

If people can be found who revolt against the spirit of
thoughtlessness and are sincere and profound enough to
spread the ideals of ethical progress, we will witness the
emergence of a new spiritual force strong enough to evoke
a new spirit in mankind.

Because I have confidence in the power of truth and of
the spirit, I believe in the future of mankind. Ethical ac-
ceptance of the world contains within itself an optimistic
willing and hoping that can never be lost. It is, therefore,
never afraid to face the somber reality as it really is.

In my own life, I had times in which anxiety, trouble,
and sorrow were so overwhelming that, had my nerves not

244 OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT

been so strong, I might have broken down under the
weight. Heavy is the burden of fatigue and responsibility
that has lain upon me without a break for years. I have not
had much of my life for myself. But I have had blessings
too: that I am allowed to work in the service of compassion;
that my work has been successful; that I receive from other
people affection and kindness in abundance; that I have
loyal helpers who consider my work as their own; that I
enjoy a health that allows me to undertake the most ex-
hausting work; that I have a well-balanced temperament,
which varies little, and an energy that can be exerted with
calm and deliberation; and that I can recognize whatever
happiness I feel and accept it as a gift.

I am also deeply grateful that I can work in freedom at
a time when an oppressive dependence is the fate of so
many. Though my immediate work is practical, I also have
opportunities to pursue my spiritual and intellectual inter-
ests.

That the circumstances of my life have provided such
favorable conditions for my work, I accept as a blessing for
which I hope to prove worthy.

How much of the work I have planned shall I be able to
complete?

My hair is beginning to turn gray. My body is beginning
to show signs of the exertions I have demanded of it and
of the passage of the years.

I look back with gratitude to the time when, without
having to husband my strength, I could pursue my physical
and mental activities without interruption.

I look forward to the future with calmness and humility
so that I may be prepared for renunciation if it be required
of me. Whether we are active or suffering, we must find

Epilogue 245

the courage of those who have struggled to achieve the
peace that passeth all understanding.

Lambar6n6
march 7, 1931

Chronology

1875

January 14, bom in Kaysersberg, Alsace.
During the year, family moved to Giinsbach.

1880

First music instruction.

1880-1884

Attended village school in Giinsbach.

1883

First played the organ.

Autumn 1884-
Autumn 1885

Attended Realschule in Munster/ Alsace in
preparation for the Gymnasium.

Autumn 1885-
August 1893

Attended Gymnasium in Miilhausen/ Alsace.

1893

October, first sojourn in Paris. Studied organ
with Widor.

1893-

Spring 1898

Studied theology, philosophy, and musical
theory at University of Strasbourg.

247

248 Chronology

April 1894-
April 1895

1896

1898

October 1898-
March 1899

1899

1900

1901

1903

1904

Military service with infantry at Strasbourg.

Decided to devote life to service of humanity
beginning at age thirty.

May 6, passed first theological examination
before faculty. First publication: Eugene
Munch: 1857-1898.

Second sojourn in Paris. Again studied
under Widor.

April-July, studied philosophy and organ in
Berlin. July, received Ph.D. at Strasbourg.
December, The Religious Philosophy of
Kant published. Appointed to staff of Church
of St. Nicholai’s in Strasbourg.

“Die Philosophic und die Allgemeine
Bildung” published. July 21, obtained licen-
tiate degree in theology, Strasbourg. Sep-
tember 23, ordained as a regular curate, St.
Nicholai, Strasbourg.

Publication of The Mystery of the Kingdom
of God. May-September, provisional ap-
pointment at St. Thomas theological semi-
nary in Strasbourg.

October, appointed principal of the theolog-
ical seminary in Strasbourg.

Sees article about needs of protestant mis-
sion in Gabon. Decides to serve as mission-
ary there himself.

Chronology 249

1905

1905-1912

1906

1908

1909

1911

1912

1913

1913-1917

/. S. Bach le musicien-poite published in
Paris. October 13, informed friends of de-
cision to study medicine, serve in Africa.
October, resigned his post at the theological
seminary.

Medical studies, University of Strasbourg.

The Art of Organ-Building and Organ-Play-
ing in Germany and France and The Quest
of the Historical Jesus published.

J. S. Bach published.

Third Congress of the International Music
Society in Vienna. Schweitzer responsible
for formulation of Internationales Regulativ
fur Orgelbau.

Published Paul and His Interpreters. De-
cember, passed his medical examinations.

Spring, resigned his post at St. Nicholai.
June 18, married Helene Bresslau. First two
volumes of Bach’s Complete Organ Works
published with Widor.

February, granted M.D. Psychiatric Study
of Jesus published. Second edition of The
Quest of the Historical Jesus published. Vol-
umes 3-5 of Bach’s Complete Organ Works
published. March 26, departed for Lamba-
r6n# with his wife. Arrived April 16.

First sojourn in Lambar6n6.

250 Chronology

1914

1915

Autumn 1917-
Summer 1918

1918

1919-
April 1921

1919

1920

1921

1921-1922

1923

1924

April 1924-
July 1927

August-November, interned as enemy alien
at Lambar6n6.

September, concept of Reverence for Life
came to him during Ogowe River journey.

Leaves Africa as prisoner of war, internment
in Bordeaux, Garaison, and St. R6my.

July, returned to Gunsbach. Illness.

Again served at St. Nicholai, and as a doctor
in the Strasbourg city hospital.

January 14, daughter Rhena bom.

In Sweden for lectures at the University of
Uppsala. Also lectures and concerts to raise
money for Lambar£n£. Awarded honorary
doctorate in divinity by the theological fac-
ulty of the University of Zurich.

On the Edge of the Primeval Forest pub-
lished.

Lectures and concerts in Switzerland, En-
gland, Sweden, and Denmark.

The Philosophy of Civilization published.
Christianity and the Religions of the World
published in English; German translation in
1924.

Memoirs of Childhood and Youth published.

Second sojourn in Lambariine, this time
without his wife, who remains in Europe
with daughter.

Chronology 251

1925 More from the Primeval Forest, Part I, pub-
lished.

1926 More from the Primeval Forest, Part II, pub-
lished.

1927 January 21, moved hospital to new site near
Lambardne.

July 1927- Lectures in Sweden, Denmark, Holland,

December 1929 Great Britain, Czechoslovakia, and Switz-
erland. Concerts in Germany. Presented
Universal Order of Human Merit at Geneva
for services to civilization and humanity.
Presented honorary Ph.D. from the Uni-
versity of Prague.

1928 August 28, received Goethe Prize from the
city of Frankfurt. More from the Primeval
Forest, Part III, published.

December 1929- Third sojourn in Africa. His wife joined him

February 1932 until Easter 1930.

1929 Selbstdarstellung published. Awarded hon-
orary doctorates in theology and philosophy.
University of Edinburgh.

1930 The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle published.

1931 Out of My Life and Thought published.
Awarded honorary doctorate in music. Uni-
versity of Edinburgh.

February 1932- In Europe for lectures and concerts.

April 1933

252 Chronology

1932

April 1933-
January 1934

February 1934-
February 1935

1934

1935

September 1935-
February 1937

1936

February 1937-
January 1939

March 22, Goethe Gedenkrede, Frankfurt.
June, awarded honorary doctorate in theol-
ogy from Oxford and honorary LL.D. from
St. Andrew’s. July, “Goethe als Denker und
Mensch,” Ulm.

Fourth sojourn in Africa, again without his
wife.

In Europe.

October, Hibbert Lectures, Manchester
College, Oxford: “Religion in Modem Civ-
ilization.” November, Gifford Lectures in
Edinburgh, resulting in separate book on In-
dian Thought and Its Development, pub-
lished in same year.

February- August, fifth sojourn in Lamba-
r6n£, again without his wife.

In Europe. Second series of Gifford Lec-
tures. Lectures and concerts in England. Re-
corded Bach organ music for Columbia
Records.

African Hunting Stories published in book
form.

Sixth sojourn in Lambar6n6, without his
wife.

1938

From My African Notebook published.

Chronology 253

1939

March 1939-
October 1949

1948

October 1948-
October 1949

1949

October 1949-
June 1951

1950

1951

December 1951-
July 1952

July-

December 1952

February, arrived in Europe; returned im-
mediately to Lambar6n6 because of danger
of war.

Seventh sojourn in Lambar6n6. His wife
joined him from 1941 to 1946.

The Jungle Hospital and Goethe : Two Ad-
dresses published.

Mostly in Europe.

June 11, awarded honorary LL.D. by the
University of Chicago. July, Goethe Bicen-
tennial Convocation in Aspen, Colorado.
Goethe: Drei Reden published.

Eighth sojourn in Lambar^ne. His wife
joined him until June 1950.

Goethe: Vier Reden published. A Pelican
Tells About His Life published in book form.

July, returned to Europe. Made further re-
cordings for Columbia. September 16, Peace
Prize of the West German Book Publishers.
December 3, elected to the French Acad-
emy.

Ninth sojourn in Lambar6n6.

In Europe for lectures and recitals. Septem-
ber, awarded Paracelsus Medal by the Ger-
man Medical Society. October, speech
before the French Academy. Received

254 Chronology

December 1952-
June 1954

1953

June-

December 1954

December 1954-
July 1955

July-

December 1955

December 1955-
June 1957

1957

December 1957-
August 1959

Prince Carl Medal, grand medal of the
Swedish Red Cross. Installed as a member
of the Swedish Royal Academy of Music and
awarded an honorary doctorate in theology
by the University of Marburg.

Tenth sojourn in Lambarene.

October, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for
1952. Awarded honorary degree by Univer-
sity of Kapstadt.

In Europe. Volume 6 of Bach’s Complete
Organ Works published with Edouard Nies-
Berger. April, letter to the London Daily
Herald concerning the H-bomb. November
4, Nobel Peace Prize speech, “The Problem
of Peace in the World of Today,” in Oslo.

Eleventh sojourn in Lambar6n6. January 14,
1955, eightieth birthday celebrated in Lam-
barene.

In Europe. Received Order of Merit in Lon-
don; Orden pour le Merite, Germany; and
honorary J.D., Cambridge University.

Twelfth sojourn in Lambar6n6. Helene with
him until May 22, 1957.

April 23, first nuclear test ban broadcast.
June 1, Helene Schweitzer-Bresslau died in
Zurich. June 21-December 4, in Europe.
Visited Switzerland and Germany.

Thirteenth sojourn in Lambarene.

Chronology 255

1958

1959

1960

1963

1965

1966

April 28, 29, 30, three addresses over Nor-
wegian radio about nuclear war. Published
as Peace or Atomic War. Awarded honorary
M.D., University of Munster. Awarded hon-
orary Dr. Theol., Tubingen.

March 23, awarded Sonning Prize in Co-
penhagen for “work to the benefit of Euro-
pean culture.” August to December, in
Europe. September 29, accepted Sonning
Prize in Copenhagen. November 18,
awarded Joseph Lemaire Prize in Brussels.
December, fourteenth and final departure
for Lambar6n6.

January 14, eighty-fifth birthday celebrated
in Lambar6n6.

Die Lehre der Ehrfurcht vor dem Leben
published.

January 14, ninetieth birthday celebrated in
Lambaren£. September 4, died in Lamba-
ren6.

Reverence for Life (Strassburger Predigten)
published posthumously.

Bibliography

Selected Titles by Albert Schweitzer

Note: For all titles the first publication date in English is listed.

Christianity and the Religions of the World. London: Allen and
Unwin, 1923.

Civilization and Ethics. (Part 2 of The Philosophy of Civilization.)
London: Black, 1923.

The Decay and the Restoration of Civilization. (Part 1 of The
Philosophy of Civilization.) London: Black, 1923.

The Essence of Faith: Philosophy and Religion. New York: Phil-
osophical Library, 1966.

The Forest Hospital at Lambarint. New York: Henry Holt, 1931.
From My African Notebook. London: Allen and Unwin, 1938.
Goethe. Address delivered on receiving the Goethe Prize in
Frankfurt. New York: Henry Holt, 1928.

257

258 Bibliography

Goethe: Five Studies. Boston: Beacon, 1961.

Indian Thought and Its Development. London: Hodder and
Stoughton; New York: Henry Holt, 1936.

J. S. Bach. 2 vols. London: Black; New York: Macmillan, 1938.

The Kingdom of God and Primitive Christianity. London: Black;
New York: Seaburg, 1968.

Memoirs of Childhood and Youth. London: Allen and Unwin,
1924.

The Mystery of the Kingdom of God: The Secret of Jesus’ Mes-
siahship and Passion. London: Black; New York: Dodd and
Mead, 1914.

The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle. London: Black; New York:
Henry Holt, 1931.

On the Edge of the Primeval Forest. London: Black, 1922.

Organ-Building and Organ-Playing in France and Germany.
London: Black, 1953.

Paul and His Interpreters. London: Black; New York: Macmillan,
1912.

Peace or Atomic War ? Three Appeals. London: Black; New York:
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1958.

The Philosophy of Civilization. 2 vols. in 1. New York: Macmillan,
1949.

The Problem of Peace in the World Today. Nobel Peace Prize
acceptance speech. London: Black; New York: Harper, 1954.

The Psychiatric Study of Jesus: Exposition and Criticism. Boston:
Beacon, 1948.

The Quest of the Historical Jesus. London: Black, 1910.

Reverence for Life. Sermons 1900-1919. New York: Harper and
Row, 1969.

The Story of My Pelican. London: Souvenir, 1964.

Bibliography 259

Anthologies of Essays and of Excerpts from Schweitzers

Writings

Cousins, Norman. The Words of Albert Schtveitzer. New York:
Newmarket, 1984.

Jack, Homer. On Nuclear War and Peace. Elgin, 111.: Brethren,
1988.

Joy, Charles. Albert Schweitzer. Boston: Beacon, 1947.

Books About Albert Schweitzer

Anderson, Erica. The Albert Schtveitzer Album: A Portrait in
Words and Pictures. London: Black; New York: Harper and
Row, 1965.

Brabazon, James. Albert Schweitzer: A Biography. New York:
Putnam, 1975.

Cousins, Norman. Albert Schweitzers Mission: Healing and
Peace. New York and London: Norton, 1985.

Cousins, Norman. Doctor Schweitzer of LambarinS. London:
Black; New York: Harper and Row, 1960.

Joy, Charles, and Melvin Arnold. The Africa of Albert
Schweitzer. New York: Harper, 1949.

Marshall, George, and David Poling. Schweitzer : A Biography.
London: Bles; New York: Doubleday, 1971.

Picht, Werner. The Life and Thought of Albert Schweitzer. Lon-
don: Allen and Unwin, 1964.

Roback, A. A., ed. The Albert Schweitzer Jubilee Book. Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Sci-Art, 1945.

Seaver, George. Albert Schweitzer: The Man and His Mind.
London: Black, 1947.

260 Bibliography

Film and Videotape

The Living Work of Albert Schweitzer. Erica Anderson and
Rhena Schweitzer. 1965. 16mm film, color, 35 min.

The Spirit of Albert Schweitzer. John Scudder. Video, color, 33
min. VHS, Beta or %" format.

Other

Bach’s Complete Organ Works. Edited by Albert Schweitzer,
Charles-Marie Widor, and Edouard Niels-Berger. Vols. 1-8.
New York: Schirmer, 1902-1964.

Griffith, Nancy Snell, and Laura Person. Albert Schweitzer: An
International Bibliography. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981.

For further information about Albert Schweitzer, readers are
welcome to contact the Albert Schweitzer Center, Hurlburt
Road, R.D. 1, Box 7, Great Barrington, MA 01230 (413-528-
3124).

Index

Adler, Guido, 74-75
Affirmation of world and life,
ethical, 57, 90-91, 148,
150, 151, 152, 153-54,
157, 158-59, 202-4, 223,
230, 232, 234, 243
as AS lecture topic, 186
connection with ethics, 155,
183-85

Africa

AS decision to serve in, 85-95
AS in, 34, 136-61, 199-200,
205, 207-15

AS preparation for, 110-16
AS reminiscences of, 190-96
fund-raising for AS work in,
112-13, 186-87, 198, 205

African people, 140-41, 209, 212
patients of AS, 137-40, 209-
10, 214, 221

and World War I, 143-44
Aims of Jesus and His Disciples,
The (Reimarus), 45
Albrecht (physician at Stras-
bourg), 4

Allgemeiner Evangelische Mis-
sionsverein, 94
Amos (prophet), 183
Animal life, 236-37
Annotationes in Novum Testa-
mentum (Grotius), 119
Anrich, Gustav, 45
Anthropology of St. Paul (Lii-
demann), 121

261

262 Index

Antiquities (Josephus), 125-26
Antoninus, Marcus Aurelius,
202, 230

Aristotle, 118, 165-66
Artistic opinion, 64
Art of Organ-Building and
Organ-Playing in Ger-
many and France, The
(Schweitzer), 72-80
Aus meiner Kindheit und Ju-
gendzeit (Schweitzer),
206

Azoawani, Joseph, 138, 139

Bach, Johann Sebastian, 11-12,
67, 143, 164, 197

AS/Widor work on, 117, 128-
35, 142, 182

AS work on, 30-31, 33, 51,
61-70, 107

Peters edition, 129, 130
Bach renaissance, 4, 11-12
Bach Society (Leipzig), 66
Bagnaud (camp governor), 172-
73

Baptism, 33, 34, 123, 219
Barcelona, 98
Bauer, Bruno, 124
Bauer, Hans, 213
Baur, Ferdinand Christian, 120-
21

Bayreuth, 12, 30-31, 65
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 68
Being-in-Christ, 217-20
Bellermann, Heinrich (music
theory scholar), 11
Berlin, 22-23
Bianquis, M. Jean, 114

Bibliothfeque Nationale, 19
Binet-Sangle, Charles Hippol-
yte, 107, 108

Boegner, Allred, 85, 94, 114
Book of Daniel, 36, 37
Book of Enoch, 36
Bordeaux, France, 115
Borkehoh (mill engineer), 166-
67

Brahmanism, 183, 230
Braun, Karl Ferdinand, 97
Breitkopf and Hartel (publisher),
65

Bresslau, Helene (wife of AS),
see Schweitzer, Helene
Bret, Gustave, 97
Budde, Karl, 11
Buddha, 230
Buddhism, 183
Burkitt, Francis Crawford, 51

Cahn, Arnold, 105
Campion, C. T., x, 190
Carlyle, Thomas, 89
Casalis, Eugene, 85, 94
Cavaill6-Col, Aristide, 22, 74,
75, 76, 130
Cezanne, Paul, 19
Chiari, Hans, 105
Chinese thought, 151-52, 183,
230

Christ cult, 126-27, 128
Christianity, 126, 150, 183, 184-
85

in Africa, 141

formation of dogma in, 121—
22, 124

and historical Jesus, 53-60

Index 263

Jewish, 219-20
primitive, 32-42, 47, 48
Reverence for Life in, 238-42
Christianity at the Cross-Roads
(Tyrrell), 52

Civilization, 144-46, 147-48,
151-59, 173

based on ethical acceptance of
the world, 183-85
and colonization, 191-92, 194
philosophy of, 231
and worldview, 200-201
Civilization and Ethics (Schweit-
zer), 200, 201-5
Classen, Richard, 166—67, 190
Clemenceau, Georges, 29
Cohn (professor of physics at
Strasbourg), 97
Colani, Timothy, 49, 52
Colonization, 190-96
Communion (sacrament), 13-14
Cong-tse (Confucius), 151, 183,
203, 230

Critique of Judgment (Kant), 20
Critique of Practical Reason
(Kant), 20

Critique of Pure Reason (Kant),
19-20

Cumont, Francis, 122
Curtius, Ernst, 22, 144, 146
Curtius, Friedrich, 100-101

Dale Memorial Lectures, Mans-
field College, Oxford, 198
Decay and Restoration of Civili-
zation, The (Schweitzer),
200-201

Deecke, Wilhelm, 4

De Loosten (pseudonym for
Georg Lomer), 107, 108
Descartes, Rene, 156
Detachment, 149
Diaconate of St. Thomas, 84
Dietz- Harter, Mrs., 198
D’lndy, Vincent, 97
Disease, 236

in Africa, 137, 195, 209-10,
221

Dogma

in Christianity, 121-22, 124
and missionary societies, 93-
94, 114-15, 141
in religion, 59-60
Dogmatics (Schleiermacher), 13-
14

Dolken, Eric, 217
Drews, Arthur, 125, 127
Dukas, Paul, 97
Dutch school, 124

Egidi, Arthur, 22
Eichorn, Johann Gottfried, 120
Enlightenment, 184, 200, 239
Epictetus, 184, 202, 230
Epistles, pastoral, 44
Epistles of Paul, 123-24
authenticity of, 119-21, 126-
27

Erichson, Alfred, 5, 44
Erlach, Ada von, 101-2
Erlach, Greda von, 101
Erlach, Louisa von, 101, 102
Ernst (pastor in Strasbourg),
180

Eschatology
late Jewish, 125

264 Index

Eschatology ( cont’d )
life of Jesus in, 38-42, 45, 46-
52, 53, 128

in Pauline teaching, 118-25,
219-20

Eschatology of St. Paul ....

The (Kabisch), 123
Ethics, 154, 157-58, 186, 200, 238
and affirmation of life and
world, 202-4

and civilization, 148, 183-85
and doctrine of spirit, 218-20
and Reverence for Life, 157,
234-37

and thought, 152-53
Evil, 157, 240, 242
Ewald, Richard, 97

Faur6, Gabriel, 97
Fehling, Hermann, 96, 105
F6r6, Charles, 17
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 203
Ficker, Johannes, 31
First Cause of Reing, 241
Fischer, Annie, 113, 178
Ford, Edward, 163
Foreign Language Society of
Paris, 29-30
Forster, Edmund, 105
Franck, Cesar, 143
Frazer, James George, 125
French Music Festival, 107
Freund, Wilhelm Alexander, 105
Fuchs, Hugo, 97

Garaison (French Pyrenees),
165-72

Gaucher (patient of AS), 164
Gaudi, Antonio, 99-100
Gerold, Pastor, 26-27, 180
Gillespie, Noel, 207
Gillot, Hubert, 63
Goethe, Johann von, 15, 30
Goette, Alexander Wilhelm, 97
Gogh, Vincent van, 173
Goguel, Maurice, 52
Goll scholarship, 16, 25
Gospel of John, 43-44, 47, 109
Gospel of Luke, 7, 47
Gospel of Mark, 7, 14, 36, 47,
50, 109

Gospel of Matthew, 7, 8-9, 14,
36, 47, 50, 109

Gospels, 13-14, 22, 35, 57, 59,
109

AS research on, 10
authenticity of, 126-27, 128
in historical research, 46, 47,
48-49, 50

and life of Jesus, 38, 42
preached in Africa, 141
Greek thinking, 150
Grimm, Hermann, 22, 144-45
Grotius, Hugo, 119
Guibert, Jaure, 139
Guilmant (organist), 97, 129
Giinsbach, 28, 178-80, 197-98,
213

Haeckel, Ernst, 106
Haerpfer, Frederic, 80
Hamack, Adolf von, 21-22, 48,
121

Hase, Karl, 48

Index 265

Hauptmann, Gerhart, 30
Hausknecht, Emma, 215
Hediger (physician at Lambar-
4n6), 217

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Fried-
rich, 106, 203
Hellenism

in Pauline teaching, 122-24,
125

Hepding, Hugo, 122
Herrenschmidt, Ad£le, 98
Hesse, Adolph Friedrich, 129-
30, 133

Hinduism, 183, 184, 185
Hirsch, William, 107, 108
Historical-critical method, 45-
48

History

and religion, 54

“History of the Last Supper and
Baptism in the Early
Christian Period, The”
(Schweitzer), 34
Hofineister, Franz, 97
Holland, 75
Holsten, Karl, 121
Holtzmann, Heinrich Julius, 6-
7, 8, 10, 16, 35, 43, 44,
48, 121

Holtzmann, Oscar, 48
Human rights, 193
Humanities, 103
Humanity, affirmation of, 90-91

Idealism, 91

Ignatius (Roman historian), 220
litis, John, 172

Indian thought, 149, 156-57,
230

Internationa] Musical Society,
74-75

“International Regulations for
Organ Building,” 75—76
Isaiah (prophet), 40-41, 183
Islam, 183, 185

Jacobsthal, Gustav, 11
Jaell-Trautmann, Marie, 17-19,
22

Jager (friend of AS), 25
Jenseits von Gut und Bose
(Nietzsche), 64
Jesus, 59, 150, 184, 235
AS study of life of, 10, 13-14,
32-42, 44, 45-52, 107
death of, 36, 38, 40-41, 48,
121

historical, 9-10, 53-60, 125-
28

mental illness (theory), 107-9
public activities of, 7-9, 35-
38, 42

see also Messiah
J6sus Christ et les croyances mes-
sianiques de son temps
(Colani), 49

Jesus Nazarenus (Volkmar), 49
John the Baptist, 7-9, 10
Josephus, 125-26
Jost, Ludwig, 97
Judaism, 48-49, 107-9, 122-23,
124, 128, 183, 217
Jesus in, 107-9
and the Law, 218

266 Index

Judaism ( cont’d )

Messianic beliefs, 8
Justification by faith (doctrine),
119, 219-20

Justin (Roman historian), 220

Kabisch, Richard, 123
Kaftan, Julius, 21
Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial
Church, 22

Kant, Immanuel, 16, 19-20, 32,
203

Kaufmann, Robert, 160, 177
Keim, Theodore, 48
Kingdom of God, 14, 37, 38-42,
53, 56-58, 59, 109
ethical, 36, 46, 48
Kittel (organist), 130
Knittel, Pastor, 26-27, 180
Knowledge, 225, 230-32
Kottmann, Mathilde, 215
Kraus, Oscar, 199
Krull (captain), 6
Kunstwart (journal), 65

Ladegast (organ builder), 74-75
Lagerfelt, Greta, 190
Lambar^nd mission station, 113 —
14, 136-61, 162-63, 182,
187, 188, 198, 208-10
new hospital at, 210-15, 217,
221-22

Lang, Heinrich, 72
Last Supper, 13-14, 219
AS study of, 32-42, 118
Lauterburg, Mark, 211
Law (the), 218

and Christianity, 120-22, 124,
219

Ledderhose (professor of surgery
at Strasbourg), 105
Leibnitz, Gottfried Wilhelm,
242

Lemmens, Nicholas Jagnes (or-
ganist), 130

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 45
Levy, Ernst, 105
Liberal Protestantism, 52, 93-94
Lichtenberger, Henri, 29
Liebrich (pastor), 172
Life, 104, 235-36
see also Affirmation of world
and life, ethical; Rev-
erence for Life (concept)
Life of Jesus (Strauss), 47
Lindblad (publisher), 189-90
Liszt, Franz, 17
Lohse, Otto, 12
Loman, Abraham Dirk, 124
Love, 219, 240
ethic of, 37, 150, 238
religion of, 55, 56, 57-58, 60,
87, 92

Lucius, Ernst, 45
Liidemann, Herrmann, 121
Lull, Ramdn, 99
Luther, Martin, 64

Madelung, Otto Wilhelm, 105,
107

Man/universe relationship, 230,
231, 232

and Reverence for Life, 233-
34

Index 267

Martin, Emmy, 213
Mendelssohn, Felix, 143
M6n£goz, Louis Eugene, 17,
52

Meng-tse (Mencius), 151, 230
Merklin organ, 31
Messiah, 33, 36, 47, 128
Jesus as, 8, 39-42, 45, 49-50,
58, 108-9, 218

Messianic expectations, 35-37,
58

Messianic Kingdom, 9, 36, 39,
40, 41, 217, 218
supernatural, 107-9
Messianic Secret of the Gospels,
The (Wrede), 45, 49
Metaphysics (Aristotle), 118
Mettemich-Sander, Princess, 98
Meyer, Arnold, 177
Meyer, Erich, 105
Meylander (physician at Lam-
bar6n6), 221
Millet, Luis, 98-99
Minder, Robert, 29
Missionary societies, 92-95, 114
Mi-tse (Micius), 151, 230
Mittedungen aus Lamharine
(newsletter), 213
Monenzali (carpenter), 213, 221
Montgomery, W., 51
Morals, morality, 20-21, 191,
200

Morel, L6on, 137
Moritz, Friedrich, 105
Mottl, Felix, 69-70
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 66
Munch, Charles, 62

Munch, Ernest, 11-12, 62
Munch, Eugene, 3-4
Munch, Fritz, 12
Miindler, Ernst, 217
Music, 12, 66-67
architecture of, 5, 67-68, 133
AS study of/love for, 2, 3-5,
11-13, 16-19

Musiciens d’aujourd’hui (Rol-
land), 167

Mystical union (doctrine), 118,
119, 121, 122-23, 124-
25

Mysticism, 123, 185, 231-32
of being-in-Christ, 218-20
ethical, 204

and Reverence for Life, 237-
38

Mysticism of Paul the Apostle,
The (Schweitzer), 22, 34,
44, 208, 213, 216-22

Nassau (American missionary at
Lambar6n6), 113, 138
Natural sciences, 230, 231
Negation, 149, 150, 156-57,
184-85

Nessmann, Victor, 211
Newman, Ernest, 65
New Testament
authenticity of, 54-55
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm,
30, 64

Non-Supematural History of the
Great Prophet of Naza-
reth, A (Venturini), 47
Notre Dame, 22, 74

268 Index

Oberammergau, 30
Ochs, Siegfried, 70
Ogouma, Emil, 155
On Heroes and Hero-Worship
(Carlyle), 89

On the Edge of the Primeval For-
est (Schweitzer), 190
Orfed Catali (Barcelona), 98,
185, 197

Organ building, 71-80, 100
Organs, organ playing, 2, 22, 71-
80, 130-35, 185
AS, in Africa, 142-43, 167,
199

AS, recitals, 65, 77, 97-98,
107, 187, 197, 198-99,
216

concert, 79-80
modem, 22, 76, 132, 134
old, 72-73, 74-75, 76, 78-79,
132, 133, 187

Pantheism, 241

Paris, 16-19, 23, 28-30, 97-100
Paris Bach Society, 97, 113, 142,
199

Paris Missionary Society, 85-86,
92, 94-95, 113-15, 141,
186-87
Parsifal, 12

Paul the Apostle, 28, 34, 60, 86,
141, 240

AS study of, 117-25, 144
Epistle to the Philippians,
110-11

mysticism of, 217-20
Pauline doctrine, 34, 97

Paulsen, Friedrich, 21
Paulus der Apostel Jesu Christi
(Baur), 120-21

Pfersdorff (professor of psychia-
try, Strasbourg), 105
Pfister, Oskar, 205-6
Pfleiderer, Otto, 21, 121
Philipp, Isidore, 17, 18-19
Philippi, Mariah, 113
Philosophy, 203, 230, 231
AS study in, 5-6, 11, 15-17,
19-21, 24-25, 183
and civilization, 153, 154-55,
200-201

and ethics, 159-60
secondary, 230-32
Philosophy of Civilization, The
(Schweitzer), 34, 144-46,
159-61, 162-63, 165,

169, 176, 182, 186, 190,
197, 198, 200-205
Philosophy of history, 103
Philosophy of religion
Kant, 19-21
Piano playing, 17-18
Piety, 240-41
Plasticity

in music of Bach, 67, 134
in organ playing, 5, 22
Politics (Aristotle), 165-66
Pomeroy-Cragg, Ambrose, 214
Pourtales, Mdlanie de, 98
Pre-Messianic Tribulation, 39,
40

Progress, 145-46, 201, 224
ethical, 148, 150-51, 243
Psalms of Solomon, 36

Index 269

Quest of the Historical Jesus,
The (Schweitzer), 33, 34,
43-52, 58-59, 61, 65,
100, 102, 118
revised edition, 117, 125

Rationalism, 202-4, 226, 227,
230, 238

Realpolitik, 145, 226
Reason, 119, 203-4
Redemption through sacrifice
(doctrine), 121, 122, 124-
25

Reformation, 184
Reger, Max, 143
Reimann, Heinrich, 22
Reimarus, Hermann Samuel,
45-46, 47
Reinach, Fanny, 98
Reinach, Theodore, 98
Reitzenstein, Richard, 122
Religion(s), 54, 60, 186
AS study of, 182-85, 205
and truth, 57, 59-60
Religion Within the Limits of
Reason Alone (Kant), 20
Religious Philosophy of Kant,
The (Schweitzer), 24-25
Renaissance, 150-51, 184
Renan, Ernest, 44, 48, 121, 186
Resignation, 233, 234
Reuss, Edouard, 44, 121
Reverence for Life (concept),
155-59, 186, 204, 223
and Christianity, 238-42
and ethical mysticism, 237-38
and ethics, 234-37

and man/universe relation-
ship, 233-34
and thinking, 232
Rhode, Erwin, 122
Riddle of the Universe, The
(Haeckel), 106

Robertson, John M., 125, 127
Rolland, Romain, 28-29, 167
Romanticism, 226
Rosenfeld (professor of psychia-
try at Strasbourg), 105
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 64
Russell, Mrs. C. E. B. (Lilian),
214

Sabatier, Louis Auguste, 17, 52
Sacraments, 44, 123
St. Matthew Passion (Bach), 197
St. Nicholai (church), 25-28,
110-11, 113, 180
St. R6my de Provence, 172-74
St. Sulpice (church), 22, 74
St. Thomas (Collegium Wilhel-
mitanum), 5, 25, 83, 100
AS resignation from, 81, 100
St. Thomas Chapter, 16
St. Wilhelm (church), 11-12
Bach Society, 62
Sanday, William, 51-52
Scherdlin, Miss, 85
Schillinger (grandfather of AS),
2, 71

Schirmer, G. (publisher), 128
Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 13-
14, 120

Schmiedeberg (professor), 105-6
Schmitz, Anna, 221

270 Index

Schnabel, Miss, 217
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 4, 30,
156, 230

Schorbach, Dr., 119
Schumm, Charlotte, 181
Schwalbe, Gustav, 97, 105-6
Schwander (mayor of Stras-
bourg), 180

Schweitzer, Adele (n£e Schillin-
ger) (mother), 1, 2
Schweitzer, Albert
childhood, 1-14
clerical posts, 25-27
concerts, recitals, 65, 77, 97-

98, 107, 187, 197, 198-

99, 216

decision to go to Africa, 81-95
doctoral dissertation, 125
education, 15-23, 24-25
friendships, 28-29, 51, 98, 199
health/illness, 19, 34, 107,
165, 173-74, 180, 186,
244

idea of service to others, 82-
85, 87, 88-91
languages, 63-64
lectures, lecturing, 29-30, 65,
110, 185-86, 187, 198-
99, 205, 216
literary studies, 117-35
medical service in Africa, 136-
61, 199-200, 205, 207-15
medical studies, 33-34, 51,
65, 96-109, 117
personal characteristics, 4, 26
31

pessimism/optimism, 242-43

preaching, 25 26-27, 65, 97,
110-11, 142-43, 182-88
scholarships, 16, 25
teaching, 27-28, 43-52, 96,
97, 199
works, 12

on Bach, 33, 61-70, 107,
128-35, 142

on organs, 71, 72-80, 100
translations, 51, 65
see also under title of indi-
vidual work

Schweitzer, Charles (uncle), 19
Schweitzer, Helene Bresslau
(wife), 111, 136, 164, 180,
197, 207, 216, 221
in Africa, 139, 143, 155, 160
as prisoner of war, 167, 172,
173, 175, 178

Schweitzer, Louis (father), 1-2, 3,
26, 27, 85, 93, 94, 178-79
Schweitzer, Louis (godfather), 3
Schweitzer, Mathilde, 64
Schweitzer, Rhena (daughter),

197, 216

Secretan, Marie, 221
Secret of Jesus’ Messiahship and
Passion, The (Schweit-
zer), 35, 50

Selly Oak College, Birmingham,

198, 205

Seneca, 202, 230
Sermon on the Mount, 37, 56,
94, 141, 241

Sermons of Jesus Concerning the
Kingdom of God, The
(Weiss), 50

Index 271

Silbermann (organ builder), 74,
78, 80

Simmel, Georg, 21
Sincerity, 227-28
S infonia Sacra, 107
Skepticism, 225, 226-27, 232,
234

Smith, William Benjamin, 125,
127

Social Contract (Rousseau), 64
Society for the Study of Religion,
198

Socrates, 202
Soderblom, Nathan, 185
Soderstrom, Elias, 187
Solms-Lanbach, Graf zu Her-
mann, 97

Son of Man, 7, 37, 41, 49
Sorbonne, 16-17
Spirit of the age, 223-26, 238,
239

Spiritual decline, 223-24
Spirituality, 239, 241
Spiritualization, 48, 56
Spiro (professor), 97
Spitta, Friedrich, 44
Spitta, Philipp, 66
Stalder (physician at Lambar-
6n6), 217

Steck, Rudolph, 124
Stoicism, 184, 202, 230
Stolz (physician at Strasbourg),
180

Strasbourg, 24-31
AS physician and preacher in,
182-88

Strauss, David Friedrich, 44, 47

Strohl, Jean, 160
Stumpf, Carl, 22, 24
Sudermann, Hermann, 30
Suffering, 242-43
Sylva, Carmen, 70
Synoptics, 6-9, 10

Tacitus, 126
fannhduser, 12, 98
Theology

AS study of, 5-6, 11, 13-14,
15, 25-26, 32-42
Thiele, Johannes, 97
Thoma, Agatha, 181
Thoma, Hans, 181
Thought

and Christianity, 238-42
and civilization, 156-57, 158,
159

elemental/nonelemental, 231-
32

and ethical mysticism, 237
and ethics, 152-53
neglect of, 224-26
origin of truth in, 227
and religion, 60
and Reverence for Life, 234
Trensz, Fr6d6rick, 211
Truth, 103, 154, 225, 226-27, 243
and religion, 54, 55-56, 57,
59-60

Tyrell, George, 52

Universal Exposition (London,
1854), 130

University of Strasbourg, 112-
13, 119

272 Index

University of Strasbourg ( cont’d )
AS at, 5-6, 10-11, 13, 15-16,
21, 43-52, 197, 199
Usener, Hermann, 122

Van Manen, W. C., 124
Vecchi (camp governor), 166
Venturini, Karl Heinrich, 47
Vogl (singer), 12-13
Volkmar, Gustave, 49
von Ltipke, Gustav, 65

Wagner, Cosima, 30-31, 181
Wagner, Richard, 12-13, 66, 98
Wagner, Siegfried, 31
Walcker (organ builder), 74
Wehmann (teacher of AS), 3
Weidenreich (professor of anat-
omy at Strasbourg), 97
Weiss, Johannes, 50
Weizsacker, Karl H. von, 121
What Is Christianity? (Hamack),
48

Widor, Charles-Marie, 22, 61,
64, 86, 97, 107, 143, 147
AS collaboration with, on Bach
work, 117, 128-35
AS organ study with, 5, 16-17,
19, 28

Sixth Organ Symphony, 164
Will, 58, 90, 230

to create, 237, 240
ethical, 202-3

to live, 156-57, 158, 236,
237

to love, 237, 240, 241
to progress, 148, 149-51, 152,
159

to sincerity, 227
to truth, 227
Will, Pfarrer, 26
Wincziers (pilot), 101
Windelband, Wilhelm, 6, 15-
16, 24, 106

Wolfenbiittler Fragmente, 45
Wollenburg, Robert, 105
Worldview, 55-56, 57, 203
and civilization, 153-54, 200-
201

and will to progress, 151
World War I, 34, 135, 180-81
AS as prisoner of war in, 143-
47, 162-74, 175-78
Woytt, Albert, 213
Wrede, William, 45-46, 49, 51,
52, 123

Zarathustra, 151-52, 183, 203
Ziegler, Theobald, 6, 15-16, 21,
24, 25

Ztvischen Wasser und Urwald
(Schweitzer), 189-96

Family photograph, 1889, of Albert ( middle ) with his parents and his sisters,
Louise, Margrit, and Adele, and his brother, Paul. Woytt Collection.

“The House That Goethe
Built,” 1929. Schweitzer
was able to build his own
house in Gunsbach with
the money he received
with the Goethe Prize in
1928.

Lagendijk Collection.

Albert Schweitzer at the
organ in Deventer,
Holland, in 1928.

Dr. Schweitzer played
concerts throughout
Europe in order to
finance his work in
Lambarene.

In 1902, at the age of twenty-seven, Dr. Schweitzer gave his first lecture before
the Theological Faculty at Strasbourg. During the same period he was principal
of the Theological College. Woytt Collection.

On June 18, 1912, Schweitzer married Helene Bresslau. He had known her when
she was a student, and it was with Helene that he planned to begin his mission in
Africa.

:

Dr. and Mrs. Albert
Schweitzer with their
daughter, Rhena, who was
born on her fathers
birthday in 1919. Woytt

In 1917 the Schweitzers
were interned as
prisoners of war in
France, first in Bordeaux,
then in Garaison in the
Pyrenees, as shown here,
and then at St. Remy de
Provence. Schweitzer
wears the wooden shoes
of a prisoner.

Woytt Collection.

Late at night, the doctor labors at his writing table in his tiny study/office/
bedroom. He expresses deep anxiety over completing his third volume of The
Philosophy of Civilization. Arnold Collection.

Albert and Helene Schweitzer (second from right) enjoying a picnic on
one of the many sandbanks in front of the hospital on the Ogowe river.
Lagendijk Collection.

Albert Schweitzer had a special concern and fondness for children
throughout his life. Here he is awaiting the arrival of his daughter,
Rhena, with a group of children in 1963. Neukirch Collection.

In 1961, on his eighty-sixth birthday, Albert Schweitzer received from former
president Leon M’Ba of Gabon the medal of a grand officer of the Order of the
Equatorial Star. Neukirch Collection.